KAP 2026-2027 - AI-Native Builder / Platform Associate - Mercatus Center
Arlington, Virginia, United States of America
Full Time
4 days ago
Key skills
AIAnalytics
About this role
The Koch Associate Program (KAP) is a career accelerator for early to mid-career professionals with a drive to tackle our country’s most pressing challenges in more effective, principled ways. KAP equips associates with the tools, mindsets, and community to succeed as social entrepreneurs—individuals excited to find new and better ways to break barriers and eliminate injustice. Associates spend one day each week engaging in experiential learning with Stand Together Fellowships and work at one of our many partner organizations the rest of the week. Our curriculum is designed to supercharge your development and equip you for long-term success as you seek to have an impact on the problems that prevent people from realizing their potential.
Marginal Revolution University · Mercatus Center
We're rebuilding MRU's learner and teacher platforms, and we build with AI agents from the ground up — coding, testing, content, and operations. We're 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 you've built things and that you're the kind of person who teaches yourself the next thing without being asked.
What you'd actually do
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, you'd be prompting, reviewing, and shipping work through that system, not coding everything by hand.
This role flexes to your strengths. At the ambitious end, you'd 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, you'd 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.
There's 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.
We'd shape the role around where you're strongest and what the team needs most.
Who we're looking for
Two profiles work here:
- AI-native builder — you've 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 it's wrong, and fix it.
- Curious and hungry — you haven't built much yet but you're genuinely excited about this and learn fast. We'd 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 thinking is a strong plus.
- A genuine interest in economics is a real bonus — it's what we teach, and caring about it makes the work a lot more fun.
About Stand Together Fellowships
Stand Together Fellowships believes that diversity in experiences, perspectives, knowledge and ideas fuels creativity, broadens knowledge, and helps drive success. Our admissions office treats all program participants and applicants with honesty, dignity, respect and sensitivity. We welcome all qualified applicants regardless of color, race, religion, religious creed, sex, gender or gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, national origin, citizenship, ethnicity, ancestry, age, physical disability, mental disability, medical condition, pregnancy (including medical needs which may arise from pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), military and veteran status, genetic information, marital or familial status, political affiliation, or any other legally recognized protected basis under federal, state or local laws, regulations or ordinances.