BetterBasket

Smart grocery pricing with AI

Software Engineering Intern

$6K - $10K / monthlySan Francisco, CA, US
Job type
Internship
Role
Engineering, Full stack
School year
Junior and above
Visa
US citizen/visa only
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Leon Zhang
Leon Zhang
Founder

About the role

What are you working on?

BetterBasket is building the “Cursor for food & beverage” — AI systems that understand, explain, and run merchandising decisions for grocers, starting with pricing.

Pricing in grocery is still driven by spreadsheets, gut feel, and fragmented data. We’re replacing that with systems that ingest competitive data, map products across retailers (including private label and fresh), model demand and substitution, and generate exact revenue and margin impacts for every decision — then execute.

We’re already responsible for pricing billions of dollars of grocery items annually, working with leading retailers across North America and LatAm. From day one, you’ll work directly on production systems used by real operators making high-stakes decisions every week.

BetterBasket is backed by Y Combinator, Aito Capital, and founders and executives from companies like YouTube, Uber, Amazon, Tesco, and Stubhub.


Who should NOT apply

  • You want to be fetching coffee or shadowing meetings all summer — you’ll ship real systems used in production by grocers making pricing decisions
  • You want a scoped “intern project” with a final presentation — you’ll be working with real customers who have daily, urgent needs
  • You want to spend your time reading and discussing research papers — you’ll be expected to turn the latest model releases into real-world value, quickly
  • You want a structured intern program with events, career exploration, happy hours — we believe the best way to learn is to build and ship (but we do have Friday happy hours at the beer garden)

What can I work on?

You’ll work on core systems that power automated decision-making in grocery:

  • How do we extract and normalize messy, unstructured data from hundreds of retailers into a unified product knowledge graph?
  • How do we match products across retailers — including private label, fresh, and imperfect data — with high precision?
  • How do we model demand, substitution, and elasticity to predict the impact of price and promotion changes?
  • How do we turn recommendations into actions — automatically triggering and executing price changes?
  • How do we build systems that explain why something happened in a store — and what to do next?

What technologies do you use?

Core Competencies

  • Python (data systems, ML, concurrency)
  • HTTP / REST APIs
  • Javascript (Typescript, React, Node)
  • SQL (query optimization, large-scale data handling)
  • Cloud / DevOps (Azure, Kubernetes, Docker, Redis)

Nice to Have

  • Scraping (Scrapy, Selenium, Playwright)
  • LLMs / agentic systems
  • Data modeling / entity resolution
  • Product design (Figma)
  • Distributed systems / inference at scale

About BetterBasket

We help food and beverage businesses increase margin and sell-through with an end to end approach to merchandising, using AI to recommend pricing and assortment changes.

BetterBasket is supported by advisors doing industry-leading research at Wharton (UPenn), combining theoretical foundations with our founders' on-the-ground experience launching the grocery platform at Uber Eats.

BetterBasket
Founded:2023
Batch:W24
Team Size:5
Status:
Active
Location:San Francisco
Founders
Vagelis Viskadouros
Vagelis Viskadouros
Founder
Leon Zhang
Leon Zhang
Founder