SHAXPIR is recruiting engineers, designers, writers, gamers, linguists, and filmmakers to join our geographically distributed team, and help us build our software, services, strategy, community, and culture.

This is going to be an unusual job, with lots of unusual tasks, so we’re looking for unusual people having unusal combinations of skills. If you’re an iOS engineer with a background in linguistics who plays competetive scrabble, or a graphic designer who writes Harry Potter fanfic and designs tabletop games, you might be the perfect person for our team.

We believe an individual’s work-life is so much more interesting and fulfilling when every member of the team gets to enjoy a diversity of challenges, so we’re looking for adventurous people willing to strech their skills across multiple domains.

There are no job titles here: everybody works on everything.

But there are lots of areas of expertise we’re interested in. Ideal candidates will have deep expertise in at least one of these categories, plus working knowledge of a few others…

Most of our software is written in javascript. We prefer to write simple, vanilla code, with as few dependencies as possible. We mostly shy away from frameworks, but we’re not religious about it. We’re especialy interested in full-stack engineers with experience in distributed systems, NodeJS, Electron (Atom Shell), Elasticsearch, Kibana, Stripe, and AWS (EC2, SQS, S3, etc). Soon, we’ll start building our mobile apps, so iOS and Android expertise are also high on our priorty list.

We’re building sophisticated tools for writers, using statistical NLP to develop a model of literary prose, so that authors can objectively evaluate their own writing style and make side-by-side comparisons with authors or books they admire. Some of the projects in our backlog include: automatic genre classification, contextual thesaurus, statistically improbable phrases, and hedonometer integration (to name just a few). Bonus points for people with experience in deep learning, hidden markov models, naive bayes classification, semantic vector spaces, td/idf vs. cosine similarity, lexicometry and vocabulary analysis.

We’re proud of SHAXPIR’s uniquely modern user interface, and we’re looking for UX designers to continue expanding and refining our design language, as well as adapting those conventions to our upcoming mobile apps. Expertise in data visualization and typography (both on screen and in print) and are particularly relevant.

At the heart of our business is a deep appreciation of literature. It’s just not possible to develop excellent tools for structuring narratives unless we, ourselves, know narrative structure cold. And we can’t expect to help an author break through her writers block unless we’ve experienced the same state of mind ourelves. So the ideal members of our team will be avid readers and writers, with a passion for understanding what makes a great story tick.

There’s a fine line between great tools and great toys, and we think game designers (especially of tabletop games) have unique insights about designing social interactions that are both productive and fun. At SHAXPIR, you’ll create the rules for new writing contests and design feedback mechanisms between authors, editors, and curators. You’ll develop the economic incentives that ensure liquidity in our collaborative marketplace and invent casual games for mobile devices to help authors sharpen their vocabularies.

We believe TV and cinema are just as “literary” as novels and short stories. Your expertise as a filmmaker will help guide our product development, as we implement support for screenplay and storyboard authoring within SHAXPIR.

If you have expertise in at least a few of the topics listed above, and if this sounds like the kind of gig you’d enjoy, we’d love to hear from you!

We’re a very young company, in the process of our first fundraising round, so it will be a few months before we’re ready to officially sign any offer letters. Nevertheless, we’d love to start connecting with interested candidates, so we hope you’ll send us an email at jobs@shaxpir.com and tell us a little bit about yourself.

We’re looking for people who want to make a long-term home at a company with a social purpose beyond just technological disruption, and whose culture is more influenced by the fine arts and humanities than sports or frat life. Most importantly, we believe that the health of our culture depends upon hiring and empowering people with diverse backgrounds and viewpoints.