Oddup Graduate Program 2026: a paid 6-month cohort

The Oddup Graduate Programme: a paid graduate programme in trading, development and marketing

The Oddup Graduate Programme is a six-month paid employment programme starting in San Francisco this October. It is for final-year undergraduates and recent graduates who want real work experience in prediction markets careers — not a bootcamp or a certificate. What makes it different: you are a paid employee from day one, you travel to four cities on Oddup's budget, and your application is a build, not a CV.

Why we built the Graduate Programme

Graduate hiring is broken. Most graduates we speak to are sending hundreds of applications into a void. Roles get pulled. Interviews go nowhere. The market is oversaturated and the signal-to-noise is gone.

According to NBER research on the graduate hiring market, entry-level hiring has grown increasingly disconnected from candidate quality, with structural bottlenecks compressing opportunity into a narrower band of firms. The WEF Future of Jobs 2024 report flags that analytical thinking and creative problem-solving are the skills employers most want — yet hiring pipelines still default to credentials over demonstrated output.

We cannot fix the whole market. But we can do something useful: give a small cohort of graduates real paid employment, real teammates, and real shipped projects — inside a company that is actually growing. We build prediction markets, run a trading desk, and ship products across multiple verticals. The cohort is deliberately small because every seat costs Oddup roughly $175,000 once you account for salary, travel, accommodation, equipment, and the direct founder time behind each graduate. The founders lived the graduate experience most people never get. This programme is paying it forward.

What this actually is

The Oddup Graduate Programme is six months of full paid employment: October 2026 to March 2027. This is not a trading graduate scheme with paper trades and mock portfolios, and it is not a certificate programme. You are on payroll as an employee, you have a real manager, and the work you ship is live and attributable.

Four months of the programme are spent travelling across four cities — San Francisco, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Melbourne — with flights and accommodation covered in full. Offers go out in February 2027. The programme wraps in March. Taking a paid graduate job at Oddup means you leave with six months of real employment on your record and projects you can point to in any future interview.

Oddup invests approximately ~$175k per graduate seat — salary, training, flights, accommodation, equipment, and founder time. That is why seats are limited and why the bar is high. Three tracks are available inside this paid graduate programme in trading, development and marketing: Trading, Development, and Marketing. Roughly half the cohort is non-engineering. You do not need to code.

Three tracks: Trading, Development, Marketing

Trading — investment bank meets VC

Oddup is also a trading firm. Graduates on the Trading track sit on the desk from day one and learn how positions get taken across crypto, prediction markets, and macro. This is not paper trading. You read the tape on live markets, build the quantitative models behind real positions, and sit in on deal flow and diligence calls. A concrete example: a Trading graduate might build a pricing model for a new market vertical, back-test it against historical data, and present the output to the desk before a position is opened. You leave with documented work product that demonstrates genuine market understanding. For context on how Oddup approaches market building, the Maybe outcome explainer covers the platform's core market mechanics.

Development — we ship more than one product

Oddup is not just one product. Development graduates write production code that real users touch across multiple products. The stack includes React, TypeScript, Solidity, and Edge functions. Your pull requests get merged, not archived. A concrete example: a Development graduate might own a feature end-to-end — spec, build, test, deploy — on a live product with active users, leaving with a public PR history and shipped features. The posts on launching tech on Oddup and launching sports on Oddup show the breadth of what the team builds.

Marketing — sell us, sell yourself

Oddup is always growing its audience and always needs people who can build one. Marketing graduates own a channel end-to-end — TikTok, X, LinkedIn, or long-form content — and build their personal brand alongside Oddup's. The target is a real growth number, not a vanity metric. A concrete example: a Marketing graduate might take a channel from zero to a defined monthly active audience target, with full ownership of the content calendar, creative, and distribution. You leave with an audience you built and a metric you moved — both belong to your career history regardless of what comes next.

The cohort journey — six months across four cities

October 2026 — San Francisco — Kickoff and technology. The San Francisco graduate cohort starts with an intensive first month: technology training, product immersion, and meeting the full team. You establish the working rhythms that carry through the rest of the programme — daily standups, weekly 1:1s with the founders, and the first real project brief of your six months.

November 2026 — Tokyo — Annual company offsite. The whole company flies to Tokyo for the annual offsite. Graduates travel with the full team — this is not a separate graduate event. You sit in the same rooms as senior staff, hear the same conversations, and contribute to the same planning exercises. For many graduates, Tokyo is where the programme shifts from orientation to belonging.

December 2026 — Hong Kong — Financial markets. The Hong Kong graduate program month focuses on financial markets in depth: trading floors, liquidity dynamics, risk frameworks, and market microstructure. Even non-trading graduates spend meaningful time here — understanding how markets work is foundational to everything Oddup builds. For the Trading cohort, this is the most intensive month: live positions and direct mentorship from the desk.

January 2027 — Melbourne — Build and ship. January is Melbourne headquarters: the execution month. You ship the work from the previous three months — a finished feature, a documented model, a channel with real traction — and present to the team. Full-time conversations begin in earnest. Your track record inside the programme determines what happens next.

February 2027 — Offers. Full-time offers go out to top performers, who continue on salary. Every graduate who does not receive a full-time offer leaves with a finished project, a professional reference, and an honest written assessment. We do not promise a conversion rate.

March 2027 — Graduation. The programme officially wraps. Six months from kickoff: four cities, one company offsite, real work shipped, and a cohort of peers who went through it together.

What you actually get

Five things graduates leave with.

• A paid job. Employee status, a salary, a manager, and six months of employment on your record. Not a stipend. A job.
• Four months abroad, fully funded. Flights and accommodation between SF, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Melbourne are covered in full. Bring a valid passport and pack light.
• ~$175k invested in your development. Salary, training, travel, gear, and founder time — the full investment per seat. This is why the cohort is small.
• Shipped projects you can point to. A merged pull request, a live channel, a documented trading model. Not a simulation. Not a certificate.
• Founder access. Weekly 1:1s with a founder. You sit in on investor calls and board prep. This level of access is a deliberate part of how the programme is structured.

What you do not get: a guarantee of full-time conversion, a promised success rate, or a certificate that substitutes for the work.

How to apply

Do not send a CV. Send something we cannot stop reading. Two things required:

• Ship something real. A working product, a public repository, a research paper, a newsletter with subscribers, a club you grew, a trade you documented. Link it — GitHub, App Store, Product Hunt, Substack, anywhere live. Solo or co-built, tell us your part honestly. Polish optional; evidence of judgement required.
• 90 seconds on camera. Loom or an unlisted video. Who you are, what makes you stand out, why you want this specifically. Sixty to ninety seconds maximum. Phone camera is fine.

The selection process runs four stages: application review (10 business days reply), a founder intro call (30-minute Zoom), a paid working session (roughly three hours on a real roadmap prompt), and a final conversation with two or three future teammates followed by an offer if fit is confirmed.

All offers are conditional on a standard pre-employment and police check via Checkr. The verification cost — typically low hundreds of dollars — is paid upfront by the applicant and reimbursed in full in your first paycheck if you are hired. Upfront so there are no surprises. Oddup handles visa support and flights once an offer is accepted.

Seats are limited — the cohort size is set by the investment per seat. Apply early at oddup.com/careers/graduate. The application takes around five minutes.

Frequently asked questions

• Is this actually a job, or an internship by another name?It is a job. You are on payroll as an employee with a real manager and real work. The programme runs six months — long enough to ship something meaningful and for both sides to assess permanent fit. It is a paid graduate programme in trading, development and marketing, not a dressed-up internship or a trading graduate scheme.
• Do I need to be a software engineer to apply?No. Roughly half the cohort is non-engineering. The Trading and Marketing tracks do not require a coding background. What matters is demonstrated output: something you built, grew, researched, or shipped. A classicist with a newsletter and a documented growth strategy is as strong an applicant as a computer science graduate with a public repository.
• What does the international travel actually cost me?Nothing beyond a valid passport and sensible packing. Oddup covers all flights and accommodation. The only upfront cost candidates face is the Checkr pre-employment verification — typically low hundreds of dollars — reimbursed in full in your first paycheck if you receive and accept an offer.
• Can I skip one of the four cities?No. All four cohort months are core to the programme. Each city corresponds to a phase of the programme, from SF kickoff and technology training to the Melbourne build-and-ship month. Attendance across all four locations is a condition of participation.
• What happens at the end of the six months?Top performers receive full-time offers in February 2027 and continue on salary. Graduates who do not receive a full-time offer leave with a completed project, a professional reference, and an honest written assessment. We do not publish conversion rates or promise specific outcomes. The programme wraps officially in March 2027.

Six months that change the next ten years

The graduate hiring market is difficult and likely to remain so. A paid graduate programme in trading, development and marketing that gives you real employment, four cities, and ~$175k of investment in your first six months out of university is rare. The Oddup Graduate Programme is built for graduates who are ready to ship real work and build a genuine career — not earn one more certificate.

Send your build and your 90-second video. Apply at oddup.com/careers/graduate. We reply within 10 business days. If you are still finishing your degree and want a more flexible arrangement first, take a look at the Oddup Internship Programme.