Internship: Junior Developer - AI Operations

Mesa Quantum is building chip-scale quantum sensing systems for resilient timing and navigation. The company is seeking a Junior Developer for AI Operations to implement and operate internal software, infrastructure, data systems, engineering tools, and AI-assisted workflows while supporting physicists and engineers when their tools or systems stop working.

What you'll do:

• Extend MQoS — new domains, new sources, and the migrations, API endpoints and websurfaces that make them answerable
• Stand up and operate internal infrastructure: Linux servers, containers, backups, monitoring, VPN and network access
• Keep engineers and physicists able to reach lab instruments remotely, and keep it working as the setup changes
• Build and maintain the Notion project-management and reporting spine the team runs on — structured databases, dashboards, sprint automation — and fix it the day someone says it is broken
• Get lab measurements off local instrument machines into the database, and into dashboards people actually open
• Install and operate engineering and vendor tooling — license servers, integrations, the unglamorous plumbing that unblocks a design team
• Turn research code and one-off scripts into maintained tools, with tests, configuration, and a runbook
• Build AI-assisted workflows that do real work, plus the monitoring that proves they are actually doing it

What they're looking for:

• Able to follow multi-step logic, work out where a process goes wrong, and explain why — this matters more than any language you already know
• Comfortable being handed unfamiliar territory: a database one day, a network setting the next, a vendor's installer the day after
• Plans before building and finishes what they start: spec, branch, tests, review, staging, production
• Can read a written specification and implement it faithfully, and asks about what's underspecified instead of guessing
• Hands-on coding experience in any language, and able to read code you didn't write
• Willing to learn SQL properly, and careful enough not to run anything against production you haven't tried elsewhere first
• When you hit something you have never done — a Linux service, a vendor installer, an unfamiliar database — you work through it with Claude and come out understanding what you did, not just that it worked
• Treats a colleague's broken dashboard as a real problem — half this job is unblocking other people
• Comfortable saying "I don't understand that" out loud to a PhD physicist
• No physics background, CS degree, or prior industry experience required — our last lab intern was an undergrad who used Claude to create a software tool that the photonics lab now relies on for a core capability, and which accelerated development 8x
• Helpful but not required: TypeScript, Python, Postgres, Docker, CI, Git branching, networking, time-series data, or any experience working near hardware