OUR PROCESS
STEP 01
Culture fit
A 30-minute conversation with Megha, our Co-Founder and CEO. Expect to go into detail about your previous work experience and have an honest conversation about your personal motivations. We want people who are genuinely pulled toward hard problems with real stakes.
STEP 02
Technical interview
A one-hour call with Grace, our Co-Founder and CTO. You'll spend about 45 minutes building something from scratch; no starter code, no templates. The problem depends on the role. Full-stack candidates might build a simple web app. AI candidates might model inventory flow. Either way, you're starting from zero.
The requirements are intentionally vague. We want to see how you reason when things aren't fully spec'd out. How do you decide what to build first? How do you handle ambiguity? You'll define your own data model; whether that's a database, in-memory structures, or flat files is entirely your call.
You will make tradeoffs. That's expected. We're not looking for a perfect solution in 45 minutes; we want to hear you think out loud about why you chose one path over another. The reasoning matters more than the result.
This is not a leetcode interview. We don't care about memorized algorithms or textbook solutions. We want to see how you build things.
Prep work
- Have an empty project ready in whatever language and stack you're most productive in.
- Use whatever IDE, tools, and setup you'd use on a personal project, but know that we're watching how you use it, not just what it produces. The best candidates we've seen treat AI tooling as a force multiplier on their own engineering judgement, not as a substitute for it. We build with Claude Code internally and love seeing creative dev setups.
- Be ready to join Google Meet and share your screen. You may need to restart your browser to enable screen sharing.
STEP 03
Work trial
Two days, paid. We'll give you something we actually need to build or fix in the product; not a toy problem. If all goes well, we ship the code you write. The goal is simple: we want to know what it's like to work together.
Engineers at Mercator own projects end to end. That means understanding the problem, proposing solutions, building, evaluating your own work, and deciding when it's ready to release. We want to see how you do all of that. The requirements won't be perfectly spec'd out. The right answer might be to delete code, or to push back on the problem entirely.
We ship fast, and things will break. You own what you ship, which means paying attention after it lands. Try to catch issues before users do, and when something goes wrong, make a judgement call: duct-tape it and keep moving, or slow down and fix it properly.
Before you arrive
- Get familiar with the basics of supply chain: inventory management, allocation, forecasting, purchase orders, WIP reports. You don't need to be an expert, but a rough mental model of how goods move will help you ramp faster.
- Bring your own machine with a dev environment ready. We'll grant you repo access ahead of time; clone it and follow the getting started instructions. Don't spend too long on setup. If you get stuck, we can help.
WHERE YOU'LL BE
Our office is at Founders Garage in Dogpatch, San Francisco: think sunshine, startups, shipyards, and delicious lasagna. The building is run by Jeff Lawson, founder of Twilio and one of our angel investors. Downstairs he's restoring a Caterham Super Seven next to four pinball machines and a beer tap. Upstairs is where we work. Catered lunch on Wednesdays with the other early-stage startups in the building. See for yourself.