Pax Historia

Our Company Pax Historia is defining a new category of gameplay using the latest advancements in generative AI. 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. In addition, we’re backed by Y Combinator, Pace Capital, and Z Fellows. Your work will immediately ship to a product used by hundreds of thousands of players. 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. Our current position: The latest closed source models play our game with reasonably good quality, but they’re incredibly expensive. Open source models are much more affordable but almost never selected by users as their performance on our platform is poor. Prompts and harnesses are largely identical between models. A working internal eval system (with vast rooms for improvement) What you’ll do: Build and run the infrastructure needed to rigorously tailor harnesses and prompts to each AI model individually to squeeze out maximum performance. Train domain-specific models to close or even eliminate the gap between open and closed models in their weight class at playing Pax. Reduce costs associated with closed source models by optimizing caching strategies. Further improve performance of closed source models by training tuned endpoints. Evaluate and improve embedding and reranker performance in the places we use them. Enable entirely new user experiences based on upcoming world models. TLDR: Your work will directly make the game more affordable and more fun Resources you’ll have: Trillions of tokens of prompt and response logs from millions of gameplay trajectories. Tens of thousands of user preference votes per day (coming soon, pairing algo ideas described <u>here</u>) Generous access to compute (6 figure budget now, with a pathway to 7 if results are promising) Points of contacts with many of the teams pushing the envelope of inference at scale (Chutes, OpenRouter, CanopyWave, and more) How performance will be measured: 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. Culture 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. That’s why we want every one of our employees to care deeply about our product too. 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. 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. The cofounders will not be hand-holding: 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 Core Competencies: 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 fail

Founding Engineer (Unity Mobile) Our Company Pax Historia is defining a new category of gameplay using the latest advancements in generative AI. 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. In addition, we're backed by Y Combinator, Pace Capital, and Z Fellows. Your work will immediately ship to a product used by hundreds of thousands of players. Please apply on Ashby. The Role We're hiring a founding-level Unity developer to build our native mobile app, working in-person full-time in San Francisco (in Dogpatch). You will report directly to the cofounders. Our current position: A web-based game with strong product-market fit - especially in the alternate-history niche. Hundreds of thousands of users who have been requesting a native mobile experience. A well-documented TypeScript codebase with clear data models and API patterns you'll integrate with. No existing Unity codebase. You'll be architecting from scratch. What you'll work on: Building our core gameplay loop for iOS and Android: interactive map, action submission, event viewing, and AI-driven chat. Creating a performant 2D map rendering system capable of displaying thousands of regions with smooth pan/zoom and animated territory changes. Developing a consistent UI component library that matches our web design system (custom components, Poppins typography, dark/light modes). Integrating with our existing Firebase/Supabase backend and AI services via REST APIs. Implementing push notifications and deep linking for seamless user engagement. Optimizing for lower-end mobile devices and memory-constrained environments. TLDR: Your work will bring Pax Historia to mobile and unlock our next phase of growth What this role is NOT: This is not a traditional 3D game development role. We don't need complex shaders, physics simulations, or particle systems. The core challenges are 2D UI/UX consistency and performant map rendering not visual fidelity. Resources you'll have: Direct access to our existing TypeScript codebase and API documentation. Essential CI/CD tools and sandbox environments for fast development. A culture of rapid code review so you can ship and test quickly. The cofounders' full attention (you'll be our primary mobile investment). How performance will be measured: Your goal will be to ship a polished mobile app that matches the core web experience and achieves strong user retention metrics. 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. Culture 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. That's why we want every one of our employees to care deeply about our product too. 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. 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. The cofounders will not be hand-holding: 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 Core Competencies: You have shipped Unity apps to the App Sto

Our Company Pax Historia is defining a new category of gameplay using the latest advancements in generative AI. 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. Please apply on Ashby. The Role We’re hiring social-media creators to work remotely as contractors. You will report to the Chief of Staff and the Community Manager. Our current position: We have a very active international community of players. Pax Historia allows players to publish their own ‘presets.’ This has allowed for a huge variety of possible games for new users. Players frequently generate interesting, funny, and highly shareable moments (AI-to-player conversations, creative maps & scenarios), but this hasn’t yet been showcased enough outside our Discord and Reddit communities. Most of our players discovered Pax Historia after hearing about us from Youtube reviews or word-of-mouth recommendations. We currently have a very active Discord, a semi-active Reddit, and a fairly minimal Pax Historia Wiki. What you’ll do: Create engaging, short-form content that gets people talking about Pax Historia. Produce attention-grabbing but non-spammy content. Engage with our core audience– history and grand strategy nerds– while also reaching new audiences who might be more interested in fantasy/sci-fi/etc. Carefully monitor your engagement statistics to see what is working and continually improve on it. Promote a friendly gaming community. While some content can be ‘edgy’, it must remain appropriate and aligned with our community standards. How performance will be measured: Engagement metrics will be regularly evaluated (views, comments, shares, likes, etc.). The number of sign-ups you drive with your content. Alignment between the image you promote and our vision for the game and community. Ideally, we would like to see 7 high-quality short form videos per week (ie, 1 per day). Culture 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. That’s why we want every one of our employees to care deeply about our product too. 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. You should be self-driven, a team player, and willing to advocate for your ideas. The cofounders will not be hand-holding: their leadership strategy is to ‘get out of the way’ of employees to let them do their best work. Your Qualifications Core Competencies: You have experience running social media accounts with a significant presence or following. You have strong video-editing experience and skills. You know how to effectively evaluate social media engagement metrics and are able to adapt based on them. Experience playing Pax Historia. Background in games and history so that you are better able to understand what our players are interested in. Product & Ownership Mindset You are extremely comfortable working independently. You own that you are helping create 'the brand' and act accordingly: you stay focused on the game and community and generate meaningful content. You communicate early and often about audience response to your content (e.g., shifts in sentiment, feature requests, and which groups are engaging the most). You are extremely reliable, responsive to feedback/questions, and timely. You refuse to solely rely on existing memes and 'AI slop'; you are driven and creative. Compensation Compensation has not been finalized. However our current thinking is we will pay around $10-$30 per eligible video (baseline), depending on relevant experience and scope. In addition, we plan to offer performance-based bonuses for videos that perform well. Bonus tiers and payout structure may be adjusted over time as we learn what works, and we will comm

Our Company Pax Historia is an alternate-history sandbox game where players choose a country, a moment in time, and rewrite the course of history. What if Rome never fell? What if the Soviet Union survived? What if Genghis Khan ruled for another generation? We’re backed by Y Combinator, Pace Capital, and Z Fellows, have seen nearly 20 million rounds played, and are growing quickly. Your work will immediately ship to a product used by hundreds of thousands of players. Please apply on Ashby. Culture 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. That’s why we want every one of our employees to care deeply about our product too. History 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. 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. The cofounders will not be hand-holding: 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. The Role We need a web developer to work in-person full-time in San Francisco (in Dogpatch). You will report directly to the cofounders. 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. The exact timing of the hours you work is flexible. As a web developer, you will primarily be responsible for helping us build and improve the customer experience of paxhistoria.co.  In addition, since we are still a very small team, you should expect to frequently help with other ad-hoc projects as needed. This is not a static role! Your Qualifications We are not hiring for a particular degree or number of years of experience. That said, you should be extremely comfortable with cross-functional full-stack development. You should be able to think through problems, create workable solutions, and debug complex code on your own. Ideally, you already have experience using the following tools: NextJS  Typescript Firestore Supabase R2 Experience with the above tools is not a must, but would strengthen any application. Please be ready to provide evidence of your technical skills (by submitting a portfolio and potentially completing an OA).  Finally, while we absolutely recognize that AI can be an extremely helpful tool, we are ultimately looking to create a culture where AI is a tool, not a crutch. All employees should be able to meaningfully contribute with and without using AI. Compensation Salary range is from $150,000 to $215,000 depending on your relevant qualifications and experience.  Selected candidates can expect to receive 0.25% - 1% equity. Vesting schedule is a 12 month cliff and 4 year monthly vesting. We will also be offering a non-matching 401k plan. Application Process Please submit your application here. If you’re selected to continue in the application process, we will email you by the end of Jan to set up an interview and/or OA.  This job listing is for a W-2 employee opportunity. We are unfortunately unable to sponsor visas (other than O1) at this time. Pax Historia is an 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.