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

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. The Mercatus Center is rebuilding the learner and teacher platforms at Marginal Revolution University 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 l