Software Engineering - Internship 2027

Horizon Quantum's platform compiles and executes quantum programs on real quantum processors around the world. Every day, jobs flow through it: submitted, compiled, queued, run, returned. When one of those jobs fails, our engineers currently piece the story together from several systems at once.

You'll build the tool that fixes that. Over the course of the internship, a small team of interns will design and ship an internal operations platform that gives our Engineering and Support teams a single place to monitor the system, investigate failures, and act on live jobs. It will be used by the people sitting next to you, and it may still be in use after you go back to college.

Horizon Quantum is building software infrastructure that empowers developers to use quantum computing to solve the world’s toughest computational problems. Founded in 2018 by Dr. Joe Fitzsimons, a leading researcher, UCD alumnus and former professor with more than two decades of experience in quantum computing, the company is bridging the gap between today’s quantum hardware and tomorrow’s applications through the creation of advanced software development tools. Its integrated development environment, Triple Alpha, enables developers to write sophisticated, hardware-agnostic quantum programs at multiple levels of abstraction.

Built with proprietary Turing-complete languages and an optimizing compiler, Triple Alpha empowers developers to build complex hardware-agnostic quantum programs. In Triple Alpha, users can work at multiple levels of abstraction—from higher-level algorithm design to hardware-specific control.

Beyond higher-level programming tools, Triple Alpha gives developers access to advanced capabilities supported by Horizon’s underlying execution infrastructure. Users can code, compile, and optimize programs seamlessly across a range of processors and simulators, with built-in resource analysis and single-step API deployment.

A web application, backed by real services and real data, with the following at its core:

1. A searchable, filterable view of every job the platform has processed and the ability to drill into any one of them for the full picture.
2. Operational control and job management.
3. Integration between jobs and engineering tickets.
4. Live visibility into platform health and usage through dashboards and alerts. 

You'll work as a team, with our teams, and with a real degree of design authority and mentorship from our full time engineers throughout.

1. Requirements and investigation. Understand the existing system and its data model. Decide what's in scope and what isn't. Identify the constraints you're working within.
2. System design. Produce the architecture, including components and services, data flows, API specification, data access design, security and authorisation model, error handling, logging and monitoring, deployment, testing strategy. You'll present and defend this before writing production standard code.
3. Implementation. Build it, using the practices we use: Git, code review, issue tracking, automated testing, coding standards, separated environments, secure credential handling.
4. Testing. Unit, API, integration, frontend and end-to-end tests, covering the failure paths as seriously as the happy ones.
5. Documentation and handover. Architecture, local setup, deployment, configuration, API reference, troubleshooting, known limitations, and where you'd take it next.

You'll present your progress and findings to the wider Horizon Quantum team as you go.

• A production system in use by professional engineers, and the story of how you designed it.
• Full-stack experience, including frontend, services, APIs, data, integrations, observability, and deployment.
• Practice at the parts of engineering that courses rarely teach, such as scoping ambiguous requirements, defending an architecture, writing documentation someone else needs, and building something secure enough to point at production.
• A working understanding of how a commercial quantum computing platform actually operates.
• Colleagues and a network in one of the most interesting corners of today’s technology industry.

You don't need a quantum computing background. You need to be a capable software engineer who wants to be challenged.

We're looking for:

• Students in the final year of a computer science, software engineering or related degree, or on a master's programme
• Solid programming ability in Python, JavaScript or TypeScript, or a comparable language
• Familiarity with web application development and relational databases
• The instinct to ask what a system is really for before building it
• Clear communication, including in writing
• Self-direction, and the follow-through to finish what you start

Useful, not essential:

• React, FastAPI or PostgreSQL specifically
• Experience with REST API design, testing frameworks, Docker or CI/CD
• Any prior exposure to production systems, monitoring or on-call work
• Curiosity about quantum computing (the interest matters more than the knowledge)

• Location: Our offices, Dublin 2, Ireland. This is an on-site internship.
• Duration: 7 months, February to August 2027.
• Paid: Yes. €2100 per month.