Why I Want to Work at Manifold
I'm a frequent user of Manifold, and a big fan of the platform and the culture of betting and prediction markets. It would be great to work on a product I'm passionate about! Even more importantly, I expect I would have a great time working alongside the team, and learn a lot from them!
Why Manifold Should Hire Me
I'm a capable software engineer with 3 years of full-time professional experience at start-ups. I'm sociable and good at synchronous and async communication, and expect to be a great culture fit for Manifold specifically thanks to my rationalist background.
I built Secret Market Creator, demonstrating my general ability to ship code and my familiarity with the Manifold API. My resumé is available on my website, with links to further resources.
Social Proof
I previously applied to Manifold in August 2024. Here's what James Grugett had to say at the time:
"I think you're super aligned with the Manifold vision -- deep into the rationalist bet-on-it way of thinking.
You were earnest and humble, and did pretty well thinking through some tricky problems in our chat.
However, at this time I don't see a match with the role we are trying to fill. Mainly, this is because of a lack of deep experience with backend technologies.
As we grow, and raise our next round, I encourage you to apply again for open roles, where you may have better luck!"
Resolution note: Timing is based on agreement to hire, not start date.
1,000@AriZerner oh it's not based on anything specific! just base rates.
the vast majority of job applications don't work out
specifically on manifold, i have reflexively bet NO on many of these "will manifold hire X" markets basedthat logic and that's always worked out
i can't know for sure manifold's business plans for the next year, but my rough understanding is that abandoning sweepstakes is a tradeoff where they lose their big potential revenue stream but the burn rate of the site is way lower so they have time to experiment/grow more slowly. hiring another fulltime SWE would be a substantial increase in manifold's burn rate. i'm not aware of manifold currently looking to hire, & while 10 months is a long-ish time, my guess is that the bar for manifold feeling like they need to hire will be much higher than e.g. in the fall when they were desperate for help handling sweepstakes stuff
so it's not based on resume or anything (which i didn't read, so don't interpret it as a judgment of that)
@IsaacLiu I envision people using them for betting on private things, like friends betting on love lives or a team betting on business decisions, while still taking advantage of Manifold's infrastructure rather than doing ad hoc bets