Cyber Range Development Intern

Software Engineering Institute | Carnegie Mellon University • Pittsburgh, PA

9d • Onsite

About The Position

The Cyber Range Development Intern will work within the Cyber Mission Readiness Directorate in 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 and testing realistic exercise scenarios with cybersecurity subject matter experts. Core technical areas include virtual machine image, template, and configuration automation; virtualization and software-defined networking; infrastructure as code; and cyber exercise scenario development and testing. This part-time, fully onsite internship is based in the Pittsburgh office and begins in Fall 2026, with the option to continue through Spring 2027.

Requirements

• Be enrolled in a degree-granting program.
• Be willing to travel to various locations to support the SEI’s mission, including locations within the SEI and CMU community.
• Be eligible to work in the United States without visa sponsorship and be subject to a background check.
• Ability to think critically and solve problems.
• Familiarity with Linux and Windows system administration.
• Basic knowledge of networking concepts, including 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.
• Organized, detail-oriented, and able 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 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%).
• Assist with virtual machine image, template, and configuration automation using tools such as Packer, cloud-init, and Ansible.
• Support virtualization and software-defined networking using platforms such as Proxmox VE and VMware.
• Contribute to infrastructure as code for lab environments, such as Terraform.
• Collaborate with software engineers, learning engineers, cybersecurity experts, instructional designers, and subject matter experts.

What This Job Offers

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