Description

About PastPort
PastPort is an early-stage company building augmented-reality history experiences for the places where history happened. Our first catalog covers Boston, where sixty historical figures now appear on location along and beyond the Freedom Trail, and we're preparing for public beta. The company grew out of three decades of service on the board of the Freedom Trail Foundation and a conviction that history becomes far more compelling when you encounter the people who made it. We're building toward experiences in Concord, Salem, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, and London.

The encounters themselves — we call them HisFigs internally — run one to four minutes. A user raises their phone and a figure appears in the space in front of them, geofenced to the site where the history happened. We package them into experiences: curated sets of 15–40 encounters that add up to a coherent journey through a place, a period, or a story.

The role
We're hiring our first Managing Editor to own how HisFigs get made.

The job spans three things that are usually three jobs. You'll design experiences — deciding which figures, which moments, and which sequence turn a location into a 15-to-40-encounter journey worth someone's afternoon. You'll own the words — the scripts and components that make an encounter land, and the editorial standard that holds across a catalog. And you'll own accuracy — recruiting and managing the author historians who supply the scholarship and the review historians who verify it.

You don't need to be a video producer. Our AI pipeline handles video production. What that means in practice is that the hard parts of this job move upstream and downstream of it: getting the inputs right, and having the judgment to catch what the pipeline gets wrong before an audience does. If you've ever wanted the reach of video production without the crew, this is that job.

You'll also help market what you make. The same voice that makes an encounter compelling in the field is what makes an experience compelling in a trailer, a listing, or a partner pitch, and we'd rather that come from the person who built it.

This is hands-on, not purely supervisory. You'll produce HisFigs yourself, especially early, while building the contributor bench and the process that let you supervise more over time. You'll work closely with the CEO day to day at the start, taking on more ownership of content decisions as the system matures.

What you'll do
      Design experiences. Develop the plan for an experience before content development starts: the figure list, the narrative arc across encounters, how the geofencing shapes what a visitor sees and in what order, and what makes the set cohere rather than sit as 30 unrelated clips.

      Run the pipeline. Take encounters from research brief through script and into production, then judge what comes out. Execute directly where needed; supervise where you've built capacity to.

      Recruit and manage historians. Build a bench of author historians who write source material and review historians who verify it. Own sourcing, onboarding, briefing, scheduling, and quality feedback.

      Edit. Review and edit scripts and other components for accuracy, dramatic quality, and consistency of voice across the catalog. A HisFig is close to a short dramatic monologue — it has to be right and it has to hold someone standing on a sidewalk.

      Hold the quality bar on generated output. Decide what ships. That means catching the anachronistic detail, the wrong period architecture, the delivery that lands as uncanny rather than human — and knowing whether the fix is the script, the brief, or the pipeline.

      Own the calendar. Set and hold a production schedule across parallel experiences, track work in flight, and flag risks to output early.

      Support marketing. Develop the content that sells an experience — trailers, descriptions, sample encounters, and material for site partners and press.

      Improve the system. Turn what you learn into style guides, briefs, review checklists, and prompt patterns so quality gets more repeatable and less dependent on any one person.

Requirements

Background we expect
Roughly 6–10 years of relevant experience. We care more about the shape of it than the number, and we'll flex up or down for the right person — but this role owns a function on day one, so we're not looking for someone growing into their first ownership role.

Strong candidates tend to come from one of these places:

      Interpretive content or exhibitions lead at a museum, historic site, or audio-tour company. This is the closest existing analogue to what we do: short-form historical narrative, tied to a physical location, vetted by scholars, sequenced into a route.

      Managing Editor, Senior Editor, or Editorial Lead at a publisher, media company, or edtech company — someone who has commissioned outside writers and held a production calendar, not only edited copy.

      Narrative writer with production ownership — documentary, audio series, immersive or site-specific theatre, narrative games. Someone who has written material meant to be performed, and shepherded it to delivery.

      Creative or experience producer at an immersive, location-based entertainment, or AR/VR studio.

What we need to see, from wherever you got it:

      Ownership of a repeating production process, with contributors you didn't manage on an org chart.

      Editorial judgment on nonfiction narrative — the taste to tell a good script from a serviceable one, and the willingness to send back the serviceable one.

      Real fluency with AI content tools, and a clear-eyed sense of their failure modes. Tell us where you've seen them work and where you've seen them produce confident nonsense — and what you changed so it stopped getting through.

      A demonstrated relationship with historical material — a history degree, academic publishing, museum work, documentary research, or a body of well-researched writing. You don't need a PhD, but you need credibility with people who have one, and the instinct to check a claim rather than assume it.

      Comfort in an early-stage environment: unclear processes, shifting priorities, and a lot of building from scratch.

Nice to have: existing relationships in academic history; dramatic or narrative scriptwriting credits; experience with AR/XR or location-based media; experience building editorial standards from zero.

Location and working style
This role can be fully remote or hybrid. We're based in Boston, and our first experiences are built here, so some familiarity with the city — or willingness to spend time in it — is a plus rather than a requirement. We work virtually by default and expect to keep doing so as we expand to other cities.