The Opportunity
As a Market Curation Editor for Politics, you'll join the Product Data Operations team supporting a new social-predictions app moving through a beta launch. An automated pipeline drafts candidate political prediction markets every day; you are the human judgment layer on top of it — deciding which go live, sharpening the ones that are nearly right, and catching the markets the pipeline missed entirely. This role calls for deep, current expertise in politics and elections, and in the conventions that govern how political outcomes are officially called and settled.
What You'll Do
- Review a daily queue of system-generated political markets against a fixed completion deadline, working event by event across every market a political development generates.
- Assess each candidate market for factual accuracy, clarity, and whether the resolution criteria can actually be adjudicated against a named authoritative source (e.g., the AP, official state election boards, certified results) and a defined settlement date.
- Verify that open and close timing is correct for the underlying event, including scheduled and unscheduled delays — runoff elections, recounts, and certification delays.
- Apply the correct settlement convention for the type of political event in question — election calls and concession timing, recounts and certification, runoff triggers, ballot measure outcomes, legislative vote counts, and official statistical or vote-count corrections.
- Confirm policy fit against community standards and content guidelines, escalating anything ambiguous, contested, or politically sensitive rather than making an unsupported call.
- Approve, edit, or reject each candidate, recording a structured reason every time — this record is a product deliverable, not admin.
- Rewrite questions and resolution language for precision, and for how the public and press actually talk about the event.
- Author timestamped clarifications when ambiguity emerges in a live market, and resolve settlement exceptions the data feed can't handle — contested results, recounts, litigation.
- Run proactive gap scans — monitor live markets for visible errors, and track campaign schedules, polling releases, and political and press social media for events the pipeline didn't capture.
- Participate in weekly calibration reviews to stay consistent with published guidelines and fellow curators.
What We're Looking For
- 3+ years in political trading or prediction markets, political data operations, political/data journalism or editorial, polling and election modeling, or a comparable role requiring current subject-matter expertise.
- Demonstrable current fluency in U.S. politics and elections — following it now, not historically — across federal, state, and major local races.
- Fluency with political media and political social media (campaign accounts, press pool reporting, breaking political news accounts).
- Working knowledge of official election administration and settlement conventions (certification timelines, recount thresholds, runoff triggers, Electoral College mechanics where relevant), and of which sources are authoritative for results and vote counts.
- Proven judgment on edge cases: contested results, recounts, litigation, ballot curing, ambiguous or delayed official calls.
- Ability to interpret official sources quickly and reach a defensible determination.
- Exceptional written precision under deadline — able to write unambiguous rules that hold up after the outcome is known.
- Comfort applying a written policy framework, with the instinct to escalate rather than guess — especially on politically sensitive or contested topics.
- Flexible availability for evening and weekend work around debates, primaries, and election nights.
Nice to Have
- Direct experience trading on, or working with, political prediction markets or exchanges such as Kalshi or Polymarket.
- Background in polling and election modeling — for example, FiveThirtyEight during its ABC/ESPN era, Decision Desk HQ, VoteHub, or similar outlets; data-journalism experience of this kind, including at spinoffs such as Fifty Plus One, is also relevant.
- Prior work on a political trading desk, or standing as a super-user of political prediction apps.
- Political journalism background and/or experience contributing to guidelines, style guides, rulebooks, or annotation standards.
- Familiarity with content policy, moderation frameworks, or editorial standards, particularly around politically sensitive content.