Pax Historia

Founding Engineer (AI / ML)

San Francisco · Staff+ · Full-time

No sponsorship$50k-$60kDetected 58 days ago

Machine LearningSystems EngineeringLeadership

About the role

We're hiring a founding-level ML systems engineer to work in-person full-time in San Francisco (in Dogpatch).
You will report directly to the cofounders.
The latest closed source models play our game with reasonably good quality, but they're incredibly expensive.

Build and run the infrastructure needed to rigorously tailor harnesses and prompts to each AI model individually to squeeze out maximum performance.
Most of our players have discovered Pax Historia organically (friends, youtube reviews) and have stuck around because we truly care about the game we're building.

You have shipped ML systems to real users and operated them in production.
You have made explicit cost/quality tradeoffs in deployed systems.
You have debugged and fixed unexpected model failures in production (e.g. expert hot-spots, structured output errors, etc).
You are willing to work on the "boring" but important problems like instrumentation, data hygiene, debugging, and reliability.
You know when to say "no" to yourself and us when something isn't worth the complexity or risk.
History, fantasy, or sci-fi nerds are especially welcome, but if you can articulate why you'd be excited to work on our game, we'd love to hear from you.

Experience with preference modeling, pairwise ranking, or human-in-the-loop evaluation systems.
Background in games, simulations, storytelling systems, or other domains where qualitative judgment matters.
Experience operating systems at high request volume.
Prior work at an early-stage startup or as a founding engineer.
What We Don't Require
A specific degree, academic pedigree, or publication record.
Prior game industry experience.
Perfect knowledge of every technique listed above.

Salary range is from $150,000 to $240,000 depending on your relevant qualifications and experience.

While we understand results may take months to start seeing, your north star metric will be to improve user-preference win-rates over off-the-shelf options with the same inference budget.
This is an intensive role and you should expect to work around 50-60 hours per week for the first few months; after that, hours may begin to decrease.
There is potential for slight flexibility (ie, 1 day/week hybrid) but we have a strong preference for candidates who can commit to in person work.
That's why we want every one of our employees to care deeply about our product too.
Pax Historia is still an extremely small company, so you'll be working directly with the cofounders and a few other employees.
You should be self-driven, a team player, and willing to advocate for your ideas.
their leadership strategy is to 'get out of the way' of employees to let them do their best work.
Finally, flexibility is also very important.
Since we are scaling very rapidly and still working with a small team, you should come to work willing to help solve a variety of problems on the fly.
Your Qualifications
Our platform brings together the depth of grand strategy with the creative freedom of a sandbox experience, all fueled by a passionate community that creates and remixes scenarios on our platform.
Our community publishes hundreds of scenarios per day, plays millions of rounds a week, and is growing quickly.

equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, or veteran status.

This listing is sourced directly from Pax Historia's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.