Junior Developer Intern - AI Operations

This is a Paid Internship Position About Mesa Quantum Mesa Quantum is building chip-scale quantum sensing systems for resilient timing and navigation. Our work sits at the intersection of atomic physics, photonics, RF electronics, and precision manufacturing. Backed by top-tier deep-tech investors and the U.S. Department of Defense, Mesa Quantum is rapidly scaling and actively recruiting exceptional innovators who want to build the future of quantum technology from the ground up. The Role Mesa Quantum's knowledge is spread across nine platforms, and a lot of it lives only in people's heads. MQoS is our answer to that — a growing, queryable information layer over the whole company. It runs on a governed API with row-level security and reaches into every authoritative source we have: parts and orders, lab measurements and instruments, GitLab repositories, vendor activity, documents, conversations. The point is that a question gets a live answer, instead of a two-day hunt or a tap on somebody's shoulder. MQoS is the largest piece of a wider surface that one person currently builds and operates: the network and access that let engineers reach lab instruments from anywhere; the project-management and reporting spine the team plans in; the engineering tooling that unblocks chip design; and the AI workflows that tie it all together. That one person is now the constraint on all of it. We are hiring a Junior Developer for AI Operations to be the hands on the keyboard across that whole surface. You will be handed things that are already designed — a schema, an endpoint, a server to stand up, a workflow to automate — and be very good at implementing them well and getting them into production. You will also be the person a physicist or an engineer goes to when something they depend on stops working. This is not a single-product role, and it is not a help-desk role. Roughly half the job is building; the other half is making the people around you faster. You will use Claude Code every day — we take that seriously, we will teach you properly, and every change is reviewed before it ships. What You'll Do Extend MQoS — new domains, new sources, and the migrations, API endpoints and websurfaces thatmake them answerableStand up and operate internal infrastructure: Linux servers, containers, backups, monitoring, VPN andnetwork accessKeep engineers and physicists able to reach lab instruments remotely, and keep it working as the setupchangesBuild and maintain the Notion project-management and reporting spine the team runs on — structureddatabases, dashboards, sprint automation — and fix it the day someone says it is brokenGet lab measurements off local instrument machines into the database, and into dashboards peopleactually openInstall and operate engineering and vendor tooling — license servers, integrations, the unglamorousplumbing that unblocks a design teamTurn research code and one-off scripts into maintained tools, with tests, configuration, and a runbookBuild AI-assisted workflows that do real work, plus the monitoring that proves they are actually doing it The one thing we screen hardest for You drive the AI. It does not drive you. Claude will produce a plausible first draft of almost anything here, and it will do it fast. What it will not do is care whether the answer is true. The people who are good at this direct the work, interrogate what comes back, and test it before they believe it. The people who aren't produce confident, wrong results faster than anyone can catch them. That leads to the habit we actually hire for: building things that tell the truth about themselves. A database replica here sat 73 days out of date behind a green health check. A service that reads vendor email stopped reading it and went on reporting itself healthy. Software that is broken and says so is a small problem. Software that is broken and reports success is how a company makes decisions on numbers that aren't true. We want work that fails loudly, explains its own reasoning, and can be verified by someone who wasn't there when you built it. Expect us to ask about something you built or were handed, what you checked before you trusted it, and how you would know if it quietly stopped working. Requirements Qualifications Able to follow multi-step logic, work out where a process goes wrong, and explain why — this matters more than any language you already knowComfortable being handed unfamiliar territory: a database one day, a network setting the next, a vendor's installer the day afterPlans before building and finishes what they start: spec, branch, tests, review, staging, productionCan read a written specification and implement it faithfully, and asks about what's underspecified instead of guessingHands-on coding experience in any language, and able to read code you didn't writeWilling to learn SQL properly, and careful enough not to run anything against production you haven't tried elsewhere firstWhen 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 workedTreats a colleague's broken dashboard as a real problem — half this job is unblocking other peopleComfortable saying "I don't understand that" out loud to a PhD physicistHelpful but not required: TypeScript, Python, Postgres, Docker, CI, Git branching, networking, time-series data, or any experience working near hardwareNo 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 This is an internship that pays $20-$25 per hour, based on relevant technical and/or industry experience. Mesa Quantum is an equal opportunity employer and we welcome applications from all backgrounds regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, ancestry, age, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, disability, or any other classification protected by law.