2027 Internship, Cybersecurity Engineer

About the Role

The Critical Infrastructure Protection Group at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) is dedicated to protecting the United States’ infrastructure from persistent threats. Our team of engineers develops game-changing capabilities for robust infrastructure in the face of complex threats. We design, build, hack, destroy, and invent to advance the state of the art, with a focus on deploying work in operational facilities. Our efforts protect U.S. citizens daily through advancements in national airspace, water, and power delivery. As a member of our team, you will have access to and influence premier research facilities like our CYPRESS Laboratory. We foster creativity and boldness, empowering staff to design, develop, and pursue their ideas. We embrace a high-performing hybrid work environment, allowing flexibility. We are a caring and fun community driven by our passion for making a difference. We are seeking dedicated Cybersecurity Interns.

Key Responsibilities

• Collaborate with sponsors to understand their missions and success criteria.
• Contribute to interdisciplinary teams designing and engineering resilience solutions for cyber-physical systems.
• Develop proof-of-concepts and prototypes of novel control systems and technologies.
• Conduct independent research and development to advance the state of the art for self-aware, self-organized, self-healed, and self-optimized cyber-physical systems.
• Key research areas include virtualization, machine-to-machine trust, and autonomic decision making.
• Reverse engineer control system network protocols.
• Analyze control system hardware for cyber hardening.
• Engage in red teaming exercises and adversary emulation.
• Design, integrate, test, and scale-up end-to-end cyber situational awareness capabilities.
• Test cyber solutions on in-house hardware testbeds representing Critical infrastructure sectors.

Requirements & Tech Stack

• Pursuing a Bachelors, Masters, or PhD in Cybersecurity, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or Electrical & Computer Engineering.
• 3.0 GPA or above on a 4.0 scale.
• Intermediate skills and experience with scripting languages (Python, shell, etc.).
• Intermediate skills and experience with Linux command line.
• Knowledge of IP networking, virtualization, Software Defined Networking (SDN), and Industrial Control Systems (ICS) protocols.
• Some experience with version control systems, preferably Git (including branching, pull requests, and basic conflict resolution).
• U.S. citizenship status is required to access APL’s facilities and networks, subject to applicable laws.

Qualifications (Going Above and Beyond)

• Hands-on cybersecurity skills and experience for Operational Technology (OT) and ICS are a plus.
• Experience with Agentic frameworks (e.g., Langchain/LangGraph, PydanticAI, OpenAI Agents).
• Strong interpersonal and communication skills (both verbal and written).
• Experience with SIEMs (ELK, Splunk, etc.).
• Familiarity with containerization and orchestration tools (Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift).
• Programming skills and experience with Matlab, C/C++, and JAVA.
• Interests in modeling and simulation, data mining, and data science.