Cyber Range Development Intern

Carnegie Mellon University•Pittsburgh, PA

9d•Onsite

About The Position

The Cyber Range Development Intern will work within the Cyber Mission Readiness Directorate at CERT, collaborating with software engineers, learning engineers, and cybersecurity experts to develop hands-on training, exercises, and assessments that improve cyber mission readiness. The intern will assist the Operational Readiness and Evaluation team in building virtual lab environments for cybersecurity training and exercises. The role includes building and versioning virtual machine templates and network topologies, migrating existing lab content to an open-source virtualization platform, and developing realistic exercise scenarios with cybersecurity subject matter experts. The intern will test scenarios before they are used in live training and document and demonstrate lab environments to the team. The internship begins in Fall 2026, with an option to continue through Spring 2027. It is a part-time, fully onsite position based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Requirements

Be enrolled in a degree-granting program.
Be willing to travel to various locations to support the SEI’s overall mission, including within the SEI and CMU community.
Be subject to a background check and eligible to work in the United States without visa sponsorship.
Ability to critically think and solve problems.
Familiarity with Linux and Windows system administration.
Basic knowledge of networking concepts such as IP addressing, routing, VLANs, and DNS.
Familiarity with a scripting language such as Bash, PowerShell, or Python.
Ability to collaborate with professional engineers, instructional designers, and subject matter experts, internally and externally.
Willingness to learn new technologies with cross-functional teams.
Be organized and detail-oriented, with the ability to clearly document and communicate findings.

Nice To Haves

Experience with a hypervisor such as Proxmox VE, VMware vSphere, KVM, or Hyper-V.
Experience with Packer or Terraform.
Experience configuring virtual machines with Ansible or cloud-init.
Experience with offensive or defensive security tools such as Kali Linux or Security Onion.
Cybersecurity coursework or hands-on experience, such as capture-the-flag competitions or home labs. These experiences may also come from educational or extracurricular activities.

Responsibilities

Build and maintain virtual machine templates and lab topologies (35%).
Migrate and validate existing lab content on new virtualization infrastructure (25%).
Develop and test exercise scenarios with subject matter experts (25%).
Document lab environments and demonstrate them to the team (15%).
Contribute to virtual machine image, template, and configuration automation using tools such as Packer, cloud-init, and Ansible.
Contribute to virtualization and software-defined networking using technologies such as Proxmox VE and VMware.
Use infrastructure as code for lab environments, such as Terraform.
Travel to various locations to support the SEI’s mission, including within the SEI and CMU community.