KAP 2026-2027 AI-Native Builder Platform Associate Mercatus Center

TheMercatus Center isrebuilding the learner and teacher platforms atMarginal Revolution Universityand we build with AI agents from the ground up coding testing content and operations. Were looking for someone early in their career to build alongside our team and own real work using AI as their primary tool.

A CS degree or coding background is a plus not a requirement. What matters more is that youvebuilt thingsand that youre the kind of person who teaches yourself the next thing without being asked.

The platform runs on a modern web stack and is developed almost entirely through AI coding agents working against a set of written guardrails (security data-migration safety verification gates). Day to day youd be prompting reviewing and shipping work through that system not coding everything by hand.

This role flexes to your strengths. At the ambitious end youd be cutting your own branch to build and test a new platform feature helping run security reviews and designing the workflows and prompts that make our agent-assisted development faster and more reliable. At the steadier end youd be testing features updating and publishing content and keeping the site healthy. Most people will live somewhere in between and can grow toward the lighter or the more ambitious work over time.

Theres also room to grow into the areas that interest you most. These are examples not a menu to pick just one from they overlap and the mix can shift over time:

• Data & analytics building reviewing and automating reports on how our learners use the platform.
• Support standing up our ticketing system and the AI workflows behind it.
• Integrations keeping the connective tissue running and reliable: the syncs and third-party services (CMS analytics email automation) the platform depends on and improving how they talk to each other.
• Content & QA owning content migration publishing and the testing that keeps releases safe.

Wed shape the role around where youre strongest and what the team needs most.

Two profiles work here:

1. AI-native builder youve already built and shipped things (apps automations tools scrapers sites anything real) and you reach for AI agents instinctively. You can read what an AI wrote spot where its wrong and fix it.
2. Curious and hungry you havent built much yet but youre genuinely excited about this and learn fast. Wed start you in a web-admin / content role and deliberately grow your AI-building skills over time.

Either way the traits that matter most:

• High agency.You spot what needs doing and move it forward without waiting to be told and you take more ownership as you earn it.
• Naturally curious.You ask why things work the way they do and dig until you understand them and you turn that into something useful.
• Good collaborator.You communicate clearly and work well with a small team.
• Judgment with AI output.You treat what an agent produces as a draft to verify not gospel to paste this matters because we ship real user data behind real guardrails.
• Creative and/or systems thinkingis a strong plus.
• A genuine interest in economicsis a real bonus its what we teach and caring about it makes the work a lot more fun.