Security Research Intern

This is a 12 week internship program beginning in the summer of 2027

Location: 4 on-site days a week in Sunnyvale, CA Headquarters.

Our Team's Vision:

At Illumio, the Office of the CTO and Security helps shape the company’s strategic technical direction while advancing the security of Illumio and our customers. Within this organization, the Threat Research team studies emerging threats, adversary behaviors, and evolving technologies, working closely with Engineering and Product Management to translate research into stronger security capabilities and customer outcomes.

We are looking for a curious and motivated Security Research Intern to join the team. You’ll work alongside experienced threat researchers to investigate real-world cyber threats, understand how attackers operate, analyze their behaviors and infrastructure, and explore how research can inform new security insights and detection capabilities.

This is a hands-on opportunity to work at the intersection of threat research, threat intelligence, security telemetry, and data analysis. You’ll tackle problems grounded in real-world adversary activity, with opportunities to explore emerging technologies and techniques, including AI and ML, where relevant to the research.

Your Impact:

Research emerging threats, vulnerabilities, attacker campaigns, and evolving adversary techniques.

Analyze threat intelligence including malicious IP addresses, domains, attacker infrastructure, and adversary behaviors.

Investigate network activity associated with command-and-control, suspicious communications, and other potentially malicious behavior.

Analyze security and network telemetry to identify patterns that may distinguish normal from suspicious activity.

Explore machine learning and statistical techniques for security use cases such as anomaly detection, behavioral analysis, clustering, and classification.

Experiment with ML models and detection approaches, evaluating their effectiveness, limitations, and potential false positives.

Help build and curate structured datasets connecting threats, campaigns, indicators, vulnerabilities, and attacker techniques.

Explore how threat intelligence and security telemetry can be combined to develop new detection ideas.

Collaborate with threat researchers, data scientists, engineers, and product teams to communicate findings and potential security improvements.

Present research, experiments, and key learnings at the end of the internship.

Your Toolkit:

Currently enrolled in a full-time Bachelor’s or Master’s degree program in Computer Science, Cybersecurity, Data Science or a related technical field with an expected graduation date in Winter 2027/Spring 2028

Strong interest in cybersecurity, security research, threat intelligence, or machine learning

Exposure to threat intelligence concepts such as IOCs, attacker campaigns, malware, vulnerabilities, or MITRE ATT&CK

Basic understanding of networking concepts and protocols such as TCP/IP, DNS, and HTTP/HTTPS

Familiarity with Python, SQL/KQL, notebooks, or similar programming and data-analysis tools, with an interest in analyzing security and network telemetry

Ability to research technical topics and clearly communicate findings

Curiosity about how attackers operate and how their behaviors can be detected

Nice to Have:

Experience in these areas is helpful, but not required:

Experience working with network or security telemetry, logs, or large datasets

Familiarity with Python data analysis tools such as pandas or NumPy

Basic understanding of machine learning or statistical techniques, such as classification, clustering, or anomaly detection

Experience experimenting with ML libraries such as scikit-learn, PyTorch, or similar frameworks

Interest in applying machine learning to cybersecurity problems such as behavioral analysis or threat detection

Participation in CTFs, security competitions, academic research, open-source projects, or personal security projects

You don’t need to already be an expert in cybersecurity or machine learning. We’re looking for students with strong technical fundamentals, curiosity, and an eagerness to learn across disciplines. Coursework, research projects, CTFs, ML projects, open-source contributions, or independent security research can all demonstrate relevant experience.

What You’ll Gain:

During the internship, you’ll have opportunities to:

Build practical experience in security research, threat intelligence, and adversary analysis.

Develop a deeper understanding of network security, security telemetry, and threat detection.

Learn how to investigate emerging threats and translate research into detection and product ideas.

Gain exposure to emerging approaches, including machine learning and data-driven security techniques, where relevant.

Work alongside experienced threat researchers and learn how security research operates in a real-world cybersecurity organization.

You’ll finish the internship with experience investigating real security problems and understanding how threat research, security telemetry, and machine learning can work together to identify malicious behavior and improve detection capabilities.