Climate Simulation & AI Scientist, Built Environment

Climate Simulation & AI Scientist, Built Environment

Company: infrared.city

Location: Vienna (Hybrid) · Full-time · Stock options (ESOP)

About infrared.city

infrared.city is building the climate intelligence layer for cities and buildings. Spun off from the Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT), we replace legacy, compute-heavy simulation runtimes with near-instant spatial intelligence deployed interactively at the earliest stages of design.

Our multi-scale platform models complex physical dynamics across the urban continuum:

• Microclimate & Outdoor Comfort: UTCI, mean radiant temperature ($T_{\text{mrt}}$), solar radiation, sky view factor (SVF), and AI-driven pedestrian wind comfort.
• Building Envelope & Daylight: Facade-level incident solar radiation, spatial daylight autonomy (sDA), daylight factor, and direct sun hours.
• Indoor Performance: High-speed interior building energy balance and transient thermal performance.
• Workflows, Auto-Reporting & Agentic Engine: A core pillar of our product is automated spatial intelligence. We chain multi-physics solvers, spatial analytics, and LLM synthesis into automated reporting pipelines that generate audit-grade documentation directly for cities, architects, and engineering practices. Our cloud APIs and SDKs are engineered for headless orchestration by autonomous AI agents.

This is a hands-on role: your day-to-day is predominantly coding, validating, and architecting these physical and data pipelines. We build fast, leaning heavily on agentic tools like Claude Code. We are hiring a focused, rock-solid Senior Urban Climate Simulation Scientist to formalize our technical validation benchmarks, co-design next-generation automated workflows, author standard-compliant technical reports, and ensure our headless agentic engines operate with uncompromising physical fidelity.

You will operate as an autonomous senior individual contributor working directly with our AI engineers and executive leadership (CTO, CSO, and CPO).

What You Will Do1. Hands-On Coding, Validation & Standards

• Benchmark our multi-scale physical models across urban microclimates, facade radiation, daylighting, and interior building energy.
• Write production-ready code to resolve physical discrepancies, refine boundary couplings, and enforce energy/radiant flux balances.
• Author authoritative, publication-ready technical validation whitepapers and reports aligned with formal engineering standards (e.g., VDI 3787, VDI 3783, ASHRAE 140, ISO 52016).
• Define rigorous domain-of-validity statements and benchmark error envelopes that municipal authorities and enterprise clients can cite with confidence.

2. Co-Design Automated Workflows & Reporting Pipelines

• Partner directly with our AI engineers to conceptualize, co-design, and validate new multi-step automated workflows: chaining geometry ingestion, multi-physics simulations, spatial analytics, and LLM-driven synthesis into automated design reports.
• Think through pipeline architectures and implement automated sanity gates, physical boundary invariants, and evaluation checks so automated generation layers never output unphysical results.
• Build automated regression test harnesses within our CI/CD pipelines to guarantee physics integrity across continuous releases.

3. Generate Training Data for ML Surrogates

• Architect scalable simulation pipelines to generate clean, diverse, high-dimensional synthetic datasets used to train our real-time AI surrogate models.
• Establish automated physical verification protocols (conservation laws, radiant flux limits) that surrogate models must pass before deployment into production.

4. Enable Headless, Agent-Driven Simulation

• Structure computational engines, SDKs, and analytical routines for headless execution, allowing autonomous AI agents to trigger simulations, parse results, and iterate on designs.
• Build programmatic feedback loops and assertions that enable agents to independently evaluate spatial results and navigate complex trade-offs safely.

5. Build at Velocity with Claude Code & Agentic Tools

• Use Claude Code and modern agentic coding environments daily to research, prototype, test, and ship code at start-up speed.
• Bring solid software engineering discipline—clean git practices, modular code, and automated testing—while applying deep scientific scrutiny to verify every line of generated code.

Who You Are

• Hands-On & Productive: You like being in the code. You spend your time building, testing, validating, and thinking through pipeline mechanics rather than sitting in endless meetings.
• Rock-Solid on Physical Fundamentals: You never ship sloppy physics. You know how to verify boundary conditions, radiant balances, and thermodynamic principles efficiently without getting paralyzed by academic minutiae.
• Pipeline & Systems Thinker: You intuitively understand how to connect discrete pieces—physics solvers, spatial data, analytical algorithms, and LLM steps—into robust, repeatable workflows.
• Agentic Power User: You use Claude Code and similar agentic tools daily as a natural extension of your workflow to move fast, backed by the domain depth to catch subtle physical errors in generated code.
• Autonomous Senior Contributor: You can take high-level objectives, scope the validation study, write the code, and deliver the technical documentation autonomously without requiring hand-holding.

Skills & BackgroundEssential

• Advanced degree (Master’s or PhD) in Building Physics, Urban Climatology, Mechanical/Environmental Engineering, Meteorology, or a related quantitative field.
• Demonstrated track record validating numerical simulation models against empirical datasets or industry standards (e.g., VDI guidelines, ASHRAE, ISO, DIN).
• Deep technical grounding in urban radiative transfer, outdoor thermal comfort indices (UTCI, daylight modeling, and building envelope energy dynamics.
• Solid general software engineering practices (modular design, clean Git workflows, automated testing, and chaining data/simulation pipelines).
• Daily, experienced use of Claude Code and modern agentic coding tools.
• Strong technical and scientific writing skills in English, capable of authoring structured, audit-ready validation reports.

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with Rust or high-performance simulation backends.
• Familiarity with Python or TypeScript for scripting, data handling, and SDK development.
• Familiarity with industry tools such as Ladybug/Honeybee, Radiance, EnergyPlus, IDA ICE, ENVI-met, or OpenFOAM.
• Working knowledge of meteorological data structures (EPW generation, ERA5 reanalysis).
• Professional working proficiency in German (an asset for navigating DACH-region municipal standards and VDI guidelines).

What We Offer

• Direct ownership of the scientific engine powering the climate intelligence layer for cities and buildings.
• Close collaboration with executive leadership (CTO, CSO, CPO) and our core AI engineering team.
• Flat, high-velocity culture optimized for rapid innovation and agentic development.
• Flexible hybrid setup based in Vienna, Austria.
• Competitive salary package plus future company stock options (ESOP).
• The minimum gross annual salary for this position is €56,854. Actual salary depends on qualifications and experience.

Infrared City GmbH is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunities regardless of age, sexual orientation, gender, pregnancy, religion, nationality, ethnic origin, disability, medical history, skin colour, marital status, genetic information or parental status. We base all our employment decisions on merit, job requirements and business needs.