My company is hiring. We've mostly given up on traditional application pipelines, there's too much AI spam and lying on resumes. Robin Hanson says that hiring is the killer app of prediction markets, so let's try it?
I work for a growth-stage fintech company innovating new ways to prevent fraud. We're based in New York, though most of our employees are fully remote. Positions are flexible; we're looking to hire people with a technical bent who are generally competent and excited to solve problems. You must either already know how to write code, or be capable of learning quickly. (We also want some salespeople, but I don't expect to find many of those on Manifold.)
In general if you're on Manifold you'd probably enjoy working with us. It's a prosocial and self-directed job, helping harden society against the predicted coming wave of agentic hacks and social engineering. You can mostly choose your own tasks as long as they clearly make our product better, and you'll have significant input into the long-term direction of the company.
I list some some desirable qualities below; We don't expect anyone to have everything on the list, but you should have more than one.
A generally sane approach to AI. Far too many engineers nowadays are either A) refusing to use AI coding agents altogether, leading to low productivity and unnoticed bugs, or B) vibecoding everything and shipping barely-working unmaintainable slop.
Security mindset. This is distinct from general software engineering; I have met many otherwise-decent programmers who are garbage at security. The code they write works for normal users, but crumbles as soon as an adversary starts looking for ways to exploit it.
People and project management. For example, an engineering manager who has the technical and organizational skills to estimate how complex each task will be, decide on the most efficient order in which to do them, give feedback on code quality/architecture, with the people skills to deliver feedback diplomatically, resolve disputes, and motivate performance.
Consciousnesses and scrupulousness. Our clients are trusting us with billions of dollars and private information about their companies. We need people who can be trusted to handle this information responsibly, both on a personal level and in terms of writing high quality code that isn't going to break.
Comfort dealing with compliance paperwork, procurement, internet research, meetings with nontechnical users of our software, repetitive maintenance tasks, and other work typical of business operations.
A solid knowledge of modern SaaS infrastructure: GCP, Django, Cloudflare, Postgres, Celery, etc.
And by far the most important: INTEREST IN THE WORK. We're not a crazy SF grindset company, we have normal working hours and generous time off. But we are not interested in people who are on paper qualified, but once hired write like 50 lines of code a day and can't be bothered to take any initiative whatsoever. The ideal candidate is altruistically-minded, agentic, and intrinsically passionate about what we're working towards.
Salary is negotiable depending on what you bring to the table; we're open to people at any level of prior experience. To address the many comments asking for more details on this: No I will not be providing a range, yes we can afford you if you're actually good. We have headhunted people away from highly-paid roles at other companies in the past, and would love to do so again.
We're potentially open to part-time employment, but nothing below ~20 hours a week, and for most positions we'd prefer full-time. We prefer Americans, but can potentially hire non-Americans if they're a good enough fit. We are not interested in unpaid internships.
I am intentionally not naming the company here, but feel free to ask me privately if you have further questions.
Each answer here is an independent conditional market on the question: if we interview you, will I be happy with your performance in 9 months? (If we interview you but do not hire you, resolves NO.) An "interview" is a face-to-face discussion of at least half an hour focused on figuring out whether we should work together, with either myself or another employee of my company.
Note that these will resolve based on my personal judgement of the quality and quantity of your output, not any sort of formal performance review. By adding yourself as an answer here, you consent to the risk that I may resolve your answer NO, even if your superiors and other coworkers are happy with your work. I have a relatively high bar, and would probably resolve to NO for the median software engineer in the United States. (If you don't make it 9 months, resolves based on my best guess as to what the answer would have been. Probably NO if you were let go, probably YES if you were poached and your work seemed high-quality until that point, etc.)
I will consider reaching out to anyone in the answers here, favoring those at a higher probability. I will also take into account your history on Manifold, whether I already know you or your work, whether you have previously demonstrated competence or interest in a relevant field in a difficult-to-fake-way. Traditional credentials (e.g. a formal degree, past positions) are also helpful but not required. Feel free to provide me with any such information.
(If you wish to keep your Manifold identity separate from your professional, you may PM me to consider you without adding your name to the market. You had better have some other credible signals of your competence in that case.)
If you recommend someone we end up hiring who wouldn't otherwise have seen this market I'll give you an M$100,000 bounty.
I won't bet in this market.
@IsaacKing can you resolve my option to NA, please? Something came up and I won't be available anymore
@traders I have added another M$10k subsidy, and I'm increasing the mana bounty for recommending someone to me to M$100,000. It doesn't have to be someone who's on Manifold. If it is someone on Manifold, please obtain their consent before adding them as an answer- if they don't want that, just PM me instead. But I am taking answer probability into account for who I look at first.
Hmm, what bar should I use for the "interview" condition? Any face-to-face technical interview will count, including a preliminary one with me to let me decide whether I want to recommend you to our hiring manager. But should any of the below count?
A discussion via text, with me asking you some questions to determine whether I think you'd be a good candidate.
A brief chat in-person about the position because we happened to be in the same place, not formally scheduled as an interview.
A take-home technical problem to demonstrate competence, delivered via email or other text medium, with no face-to-face interview.
@IsaacKing Since this market is essentially a step in vetting who you'd like to refer, I'm inclined to say that "we interview you" means you make the referral and the company does an interview
(and anything before that wouldn't meet the threshold for non-N/A. this is how I've been trading, anyway)
@Stralor Hmm, I don't think I could in good faith say that it's not an "interview" just because it's me doing the interview. I've edited the description to state this explicitly. But I won't include text-based interview-like conversations.
Just resolved some answers. Will be looking more into other people soon. Also worth noting that, unfortunately but not unexpectedly, there are social/professional disincentives from participating in a market like this, so several of the strongest candidates have PMed me without submitting themselves as an answer. (Which is perfectly valid! Just saddens me that there won't be a full record.)
Providing some additional context:
My primary goal here is to hire some of the people that I've known from Manifold for a long time, having already credibly demonstrated their intelligence, resourcefulness, and reliability to me. I've reached out to a few directly, but I'm sure I'm forgetting some, and I'm hoping they see this market.
People that are newer to the site, or whom I have not previously interacted with, are welcome to throw their name in, but you shouldn't expect anything unless you provide me with strong evidence that you are worth my time and the reputational risk of recommending you. Your answer being high-probability is relevant evidence, but I am well-aware of all the ways that could be inaccurate/manipulated, so additional facts would also help your case. Understanding what kinds of facts are and aren't credible evidence to a recruiter will also benefit you, here.
@IsaacKing hmm, so you're saying I shouldn't treat the 1k to add an answer as an application fee? Too late now. At least you can see I'm biased towards action ;)
I'm not actually looking for work rn, but give it 6 months and I could be convinced. Given the close date of this market, that seems fine. I'm based in the UK and not willing to relocate, but happy to work remote.
The biggest point on here I resonate with is the security mindset. I like to write code that works 100% of the time, which is frustrating because in most instances <100% is optimal. I'm also good at spotting (and exploiting) the unhandled 0.001% in others' code. I'm particularly interested in fingerprinting, which I know is a common element of anti-fraud technologies.
My biggest weakness on these criteria is project management - The closest I've been to management is telling Claude what to do. When it comes to people though, I think I have reasonable tactfulness.
I'm most interested by the prospect of "you can mostly choose your own tasks as long as they clearly make our product better"
I have a history of being hired via internet fora.