Founding AI Engineer

Company Description

Mercator is building AI agents that coordinate global supply chains. Today’s systems leak $1.7T in waste each year in retail alone - in overproduction, lost revenue, and unnecessary emissions.

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 recently raised $5M in seed funding from leading Silicon Valley investors and are scaling our small, elite engineering team to meet growing customer demand.

Role Description

As Mercator’s first AI/Data Systems engineer, you’ll build the core pipelines that transform messy, unstructured inputs into clean, structured, reliable data that powers our entire product. This is one of the most business-critical roles at the company: every simulation, every feature, and every customer decision relies on the accuracy and intelligence of the systems you build.

You’ll own end-to-end ingestion and reasoning: extracting data from varied sources, interpreting and mapping it into structured schemas, reconciling inconsistencies, validating correctness, and indexing it for retrieval and grounding. You’ll design LLM-driven reasoning workflows, build RAG pipelines, and architect the gold-standard data store that becomes the trusted source for everything downstream.

You’ll partner closely with our product and application engineers to define data contracts, build APIs, and ensure that simulation and customer-facing features are backed by data that is consistent, explainable, and production-grade. You’ll prototype quickly, iterate with real customer inputs, debug ambiguous failures, and harden the systems so they scale with product complexity.

This role sits at the intersection of LLMs, retrieval, data modeling, and systems design; the pipelines you build will define what the product can understand, simulate, and ultimately deliver for customers.

Benefits

• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance
• As a company we’ll work from a fun destination (think: skiing, surfing) two weeks a year

Applicants must have valid U.S. work authorization. We are able to support H-1B transfers but are not initiating new visa sponsorships at this time.

Compensation Range: $170K - $260K