The 2036 Job Ad
Do you know how to talk about yourself in these terms?
HIRING: Autonomous Value Operator Location: Distributed | Type: Full-time |
About the role
You will own three automated workflow clusters generating €2.4M in annual recurring value. Your primary job is not to execute — the workflows handle that. Your job is to decide, fast, when the workflows can’t.
What you’ll be responsible for
Making 40+ judgment calls per day — often with incomplete data, always on the clock
End-to-end ownership of value creation: you will know, at any moment, exactly what your work is worth to the business
Coordinating between human collaborators and automated systems — you are the judgment layer
What we’re looking for
Demonstrated efficiency improvements on hybrid human-automated workflows
Comfort with ambiguity at scale — not occasionally, but as your default operating mode
Prior experience taking something from zero to running and knowing exactly how it performed
Managerial experience not required. Managerial instincts: mandatory.
Read that back.
If your first reaction was “that’s not a real job” — you’re right, it isn’t. Not yet. But you’ve probably done some version of almost everything in that ad. The job title is made up. The skills aren’t.
Here’s what the ad is actually measuring.
Decision velocity is what happens when you’re managing automated workflows instead of doing the tasks yourself. You’re no longer the person writing the report — you’re deciding whether the report the system generated is good enough, fast enough, for the next ten things waiting behind it. Ambiguity doesn’t disappear. It multiplies. The volume of moments where you have incomplete data and still have to call it will go up, not down.
Most people have never tracked how fast they make decisions. Automated workflows that pause for human approval will change that — every decision logged, timestamped, ranked by impact.
End-to-end value ownership is already walking through the door. I had a Senior Software Engineer on my team who didn’t want to just write good code. He wanted to own the whole thing — the product, the business line, the hiring, the launch. His title said one thing. His instincts said another. He collaborated, but the drive to own the full arc was just there, in him. AI didn’t create that desire. It will just make it possible for far more people.
Managerial instincts without the title is the coordination piece. The ad isn’t asking for someone who has managed people. It’s asking for someone who can run systems: understand what a workflow is optimizing for, notice when it’s drifting, when it’s becoming too expensive, know when to override it and when to let it run.
You’ve probably done this already. The time you realized a process your team relied on was quietly producing the wrong output and you fixed it before anyone asked you to. That’s operational judgment. Most people have exercised it. They just haven’t called it that.
The actually useful question this fake ad raises isn’t whether this role will exist. It will in some shape. The question is: do you know how to talk about yourself in these terms?
Most people don’t, not because they lack the skills, but because they’ve never had to name them. That project you drove without a clear mandate? Decision velocity. The time you owned something nobody asked you to own? Value ownership. You’ve been building this. You just filed it under the wrong name.
The gap isn’t capability. It’s translation.