Should we hire you? [Job-finding market]

Question

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. Most of our positions are for software engineering, but we're also hiring at least one operations person who doesn't need to know how to code. (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 job, helping harden society 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, etc. while also having the people skills necessary to deliver feedback whose gist is "this 4-hour task has taken you two weeks" and "your code is trash" in a way that is more suitable to a traditional professional environment.

Consciousnesses and scrupulousness. Our clients are trusting us with billions of dollars and very 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, 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.

I am intentionally not naming the company here, but feel free to ask me if you have further questions. Salary is negotiable depending on what you bring to the table; we're open to people at any level of prior experience. 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 strongly prefer Americans, but have hired non-Americans in the past if they're a good enough fit.

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.) 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, strongly 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...

Manifold Markets · Answer

Per Manifold Markets prediction market, Pat Scott @Stralor, followed by @Quroe and @vi are most likely. See the market for live updates (63 traders, as of Aug 24, 2026).