Work / AI product build and technical leadership
SUPERMARKET.
A prediction market platform, built by a team we led
Supermarket lets anyone create a market on almost any topic and trade on the outcome. We led the small team of engineers that built it, AI features and all.
The challenge
Supermarket wanted a prediction market where anyone could create a market on sports, politics, finance, the economy or anything else, then trade on the probabilities. That means real-time trading, money moving between users, markets that settle themselves correctly, and enough polish that people want to come back every day.
It also needed AI to do work that would otherwise take a team: generating the imagery and video for every market, drafting clear settlement criteria, and surfacing the news that moves prices.
What we built
Virgil led the project as technical lead, building hands-on while hiring and managing a small team of engineers.
- Self-serve market creation with combinatorial logic, across financial, sports, political and economic categories
- AI-generated media for every market and category: images and video from several image and video models, produced in background jobs
- AI-drafted settlement criteria and outcome verification against live data providers for sports, politics and economic data
- News integration with semantic search, so traders see the stories that matter to each market
- Automated settlement, so markets resolve themselves on time
- A custom matching engine, built so trades stay correct even when something fails
- Payments, including purchases between users
- Portfolios, holdings, notifications and the admin tools to run it all
How we worked
The domain was new and complex, so the first job was to become fluent in it fast. We set realistic milestones, demoed every week, and raised tradeoffs early in plain language. As the product grew, so did the team, with each engineer brought in for a specific part of the platform.
The result
Supermarket went from an ambitious idea to a full platform, and the relationship grew into a long-running engagement covering continued development, additional engineers and the next generation of the trading engine.
“Virgil is an exceptional developer with multi-disciplinary, full stack capabilities. He is highly communicative, clearly sets then meets or exceeds expectations, and when necessary, serves as a very effective team leader/project manager. For our project, he encountered and had to quickly familiarize himself with multiple complex industry-specific concepts, which he consistently did with remarkable speed, quickly becoming as conversant (and sometimes displaying even greater expertise) than our internal team. He knows when to come back with questions and when to take the initiative to educate himself and charge ahead, which saves asynchronous communications time while avoiding wasting time moving in the wrong direction.
Virgil never oversold his ability to complete a task (nor lowballed the time or effort involved), yet almost never needed to wave off a task as being outside his capacity. He consistently produced lovely, well-functioning front end interfaces and reliable, robust back ends, across a broad range of technologies.
Recommended without reservation.”
