Founding Engineer (AI / ML)

About the role

We're looking for a founding-level ML systems engineer to join our team in San Francisco. Your work will directly impact the affordability and fun factor of our game, Pax Historia.

Responsibilities

• Build and run infrastructure to tailor AI models to our platform for maximum performance.
• Train domain-specific models to close or eliminate gaps between open and closed-source models.
• Optimize costs associated with closed-source models through caching strategies.
• Improve performance of closed-source models by training tuned endpoints.
• Evaluate and enhance embedding and reranker performance.
• Enable new user experiences based on upcoming world models.

Requirements

• Experience shipping ML systems to real users and operating them in production.
• Experience making explicit cost-quality tradeoffs in deployed systems.
• Experience debugging and fixing unexpected model failures in production.
• Experience designing, critiquing, or iterating on evaluation frameworks.
• Core competencies in preference modeling, pairwise ranking, or human-in-the-loop evaluation systems are a plus.
• 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 is a plus.

Qualifications

• Self-driven and willing to advocate for your ideas.
• Willing to work on "boring" but important problems like instrumentation, data hygiene, debugging, and reliability.
• Flexible and able to help solve a variety of problems on the fly.

Benefits

Salary range is from $150,000 to $240,000, with potential for senior/staff-level roles to go above the posted range. Equity compensation is offered, along with a non-matching 401k plan.

Schedule

The role requires around 50-60 hours per week for the first few months, with potential for flexibility as the company scales.

Pay

Compensation details are provided in the benefits section.