Cyber Range Development Intern

Carnegie Mellon University • Pittsburgh, PA

2d • 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 work includes creating 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 and testing them before live training.

The internship begins in Fall 2026, with the option to continue through the Spring 2027 semester. The role is part-time and fully onsite at the Pittsburgh office. Work may involve travel to various locations in support of the SEI’s mission, including within the SEI and CMU community. The position is subject to a background check, and candidates must be eligible to work in the United States without visa sponsorship.

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 think critically 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.
• Willingness to learn new technologies with cross-functional teams.
• Organization, attention to detail, and 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 education-driven experiences 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, software-defined networking, and infrastructure-as-code work for lab environments.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Part-time
• Career Level: Intern
• Education Level: No Education Listed