Drilling Engineer in Aberdeen

This role provides Drilling Engineers a fantastic opportunity to transition into digital software delivery, contributing directly to the next generation of well construction software and operational workflows. As a Drilling Engineer within Horizon56’s Customer Optimization Team, you will play a key role in shaping, validating, and operationalizing the next generation of digital drilling solutions. The Customer Optimization Team is a newly formed function within Horizon56, created to ensure our software is designed, validated, and adopted in a way that delivers real operational value for customers.

The position sits at the intersection of drilling engineering, product development, and customer engagement, with a strong focus on ensuring Horizon56 software is designed, tested, and delivered in a way that reflects real-world operational needs. From early product research through to customer adoption, you will apply your operational experience to help build innovative features, validate designs, and ensure new functionality is truly fit for purpose before it reaches live operations.

In this role, you will work closely with product managers, designers, commercial teams and the customers themselves to represent the Operator and Drilling Engineer perspective throughout the product lifecycle. You will support operational acceptance testing of new features, contribute directly to product research and design validation, and help customers build high‑quality operational content libraries within the Horizon56 platform. In addition, you will assist the sales team with product demonstrations and pre‑customer engagement, ensuring prospective customers clearly understand how Horizon56 solutions support real drilling workflows. This position is well suited for drilling engineers who want to influence how digital solutions are built and adopted, while remaining closely connected to operational reality.

Job Role Responsibilities

• Contribute to product research, applying operational expertise to help shape new features and future customer value.
• Perform design validation to ensure software solutions are fit for purpose from an Operator and Drilling Engineer perspective.
• Carry out operational acceptance testing of new developments prior to release, ensuring functionality is practical, usable, and operationally robust.
• Act as a domain expert throughout the product lifecycle, representing customer needs and operational realities.
• Assist the Sales team with product demonstrations, pre-customer engagement, and operational input to clearly communicate product value.
• Be assigned to specific customers where required, working closely with their teams to maximize value from Horizon56 services through quality improvement, best‑practice guidance, and continuous optimisation.

Required qualifications, skills and experience

• Degree qualified in Petroleum Engineering, Drilling Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or a related discipline.
• Proven experience as a Drilling Engineer, including hands‑on exposure at the rig site and direct interaction with drilling crews and offshore/onshore operations.
• Strong background in the use of well planning and drilling engineering software.
• Experience developing rig team instructions, procedures and operational guidelines, translating engineering intent into clear, practical execution steps.
• Solid understanding of drilling operations, workflows and interfaces between Operator, drilling contractor and service providers.
• Interest and curiosity in digital solutions, with a strong motivation to improve operational workflows through software and data.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain complex operational concepts clearly to both technical and non‑technical audiences.
• Confident engaging with customers, internal stakeholders and commercial teams, including participation in product demonstrations and pre‑customer engagements.
• Proactive, collaborative mindset with the ability to work across disciplines and influence outcomes.
• Self‑driven and comfortable working in an evolving team where responsibilities and scope will grow over time.

Working Location

This role will be based in Aberdeen, working from office facilities provided by Horizon56.

Who are we?

Horizon56 is a fast‑growing company with a lot of ambition and energy who provide leading and trusted software solutions for the Oil & Gas industry. We do this by supplying products that create digital infrastructure to enhance well execution planning and digital/real‑time operations at the rig site. Additionally, our solutions bring all stakeholders together in one platform regardless of what organization they belong to or where they are located geographically, this means that you will be collaborating with a vast mix of people and customers from all around the globe. We are built upon dynamic and passionate team members with a fantastic mix of leading software developers, highly experienced subject matter experts and skilled designers just to name some. This gives us an organisation with all the “inhouse” capabilities to create great fit for purpose software.