Mercator

Details

Positions: Software Engineering Intern
Location: San Francisco, CA
Innovation Area: Energy, Food, and Water Nexus; Software and Data Analytics
Position Type: TomKat Center-supported
Compensation: $8,500
Internship Term: 8 weeks

Apply Here

Mercator is building AI agents that coordinate global retail supply chains to eliminate $1.7T in annual waste.

Today, the apparel industry alone contributes ~10% of global climate emissions, yet ~40% of garments produced each season go unsold. Retailers are broadly stuck with brittle, reactive planning systems that can’t keep pace with the changing landscape, leading to massive waste, excess inventory, and missed sales. We believe minimizing waste in supply chains is one of the most powerful ways to fight the climate crisis while unlocking real business value. Our early results prove that with our novel tech-first management strategies, we can drastically reduce waste, increase revenue, and improve margins.

Mercator’s founders are seasoned technical operators with a decade of experience leading cutting-edge AI and simulation efforts across Google (Gemini, Tensorflow, Google X). We’ve already landed multiple world-class customers as design partners and are looking for scrappy ambitious engineers to help shape and scale the core product.

Responsibilities

Build and extend Mercator’s supply chain simulation engine (model inventory flows, demand uncertainty, lead times, and operational constraints, etc
Design and build data ingestion pipelines for messy, unstructured inputs (spreadsheets, PDFs, emails, CSVs)
Work closely with founders to translate real-world operational edge cases into code

Who Should Apply

You want your work to touch the real economy to reduce wasted water, energy, labor, and capital in physical systems
You’re highly technical and interested in AI, but care more about applying it to messy, high-stakes problems than novelty
You have strong customer instinct and care whether what you build actually gets used
You’re comfortable with constant iteration and improving imperfect systems over time
You don’t have prior supply chain experience, but are eager to learn the domain deeply

Required Expertise

Strong programming skills in Python
Solid computer science fundamentals (data structures, algorithms, systems thinking)

Bonus (Nice to Have)

Experience working with LLMs, parsing unstructured data, or agent-based systems
Familiarity with AWS or cloud infrastructure
Experience with TypeScript-based web applications (e.g. React, Next.js, backend APIs)

Preferred Skills/Majors