Managing Editor

About Past Port
Past Port 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 His Figs 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 His Figs 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 His Figs 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.

• 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 His Fig 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.

Background we expect
Roughly 6–10 years of relevant experience. We…