Open role
IT and Data Intern
We need one person who can put hands on a computer in an auto shop in the morning and pull the numbers into a dashboard that afternoon. You will need a car.
Capital Cyber is a small cybersecurity and IT company in Northern Virginia. Small enough that there is no bench: whatever you build gets used, usually the same week, and usually by someone who will tell you plainly if it is wrong.
This is a paid part time role. Around 20 hours a month once things settle, more than that in the first few weeks because the onsite work is front loaded. If you also want to spend time on the AI and automation side, there is an optional unpaid research track further down. The paid job stands on its own.
You need a driver's license and a car
Putting this first because it disqualifies people and there is no point burying it. Our clients have shops and offices across Loudoun, Fairfax and Alexandria. Some of that work is scheduled a day ahead. Almost none of it is reachable on a bus.
- A current, valid driver's license
- Your own car, insured, that you can use for work
Mileage between sites is reimbursed at the federal rate. If you do not drive, this is not the job, and we would rather you knew that in the first thirty seconds than after an interview.
The work
Half of it happens standing up. You will set up and configure computers, switches, access points and point of sale hardware in businesses that are open and trying to serve customers while you work. Things will be undocumented. The person who set it up five years ago will be gone. You will write down what you found and what you changed, clearly enough that someone who was not there can follow it.
The other half happens at a keyboard, and it is the part people underestimate when they read the words IT intern. Our clients run helpdesks, time trackers, CRMs, phone systems and security tools, and all of them hold numbers somebody wants to see. Most of those numbers come out through an API or a SQL query, not a button marked export. You will pull them, turn them into something a shop owner can read in ten seconds, and, most importantly, notice when one of them is wrong.
That last part is not a throwaway. A dashboard that quietly reports a wrong number is worse than no dashboard, because people act on it. Catching that is most of the skill.
What you need
We care far more about something you have actually built than about a degree or a certificate. Nobody here is going to ask what your GPA was.
- A driver's license and a car, as above
- You live in Northern Virginia and can get to Loudoun, Fairfax and Alexandria
- Enough Python to write something that works and explain why it works. You do not need to be good yet
- SQL, or the willingness to learn it in a week
- You can write a clear paragraph, because a lot of this job is telling someone what happened
Worth mentioning if you have it: any IT support experience at all, paid or volunteer or at school; anything you have pulled out of an API; any use of AI tools past typing into a chatbot; and any project where you checked whether the thing you built actually worked rather than assuming it did.
You do not need a security certification, a finished degree, or experience with the specific tools we run. Those we can teach.
Hours, pay and the optional research track
Around 20 hours a month, paid, scheduled around your classes or your other job. More in the first few weeks. Mileage reimbursed. Paid twice a month. The rate is set at offer and depends on what you bring, so tell us what you are looking for and we will tell you straight away whether it works.
Separately: some people who apply to something like this want more hours because they want to learn how the AI and automation side actually gets built. If that is you, we will make room for up to another 20 hours a month of research time. It is unpaid, so here is exactly what it is and is not.
- Optional. Turning it down changes nothing about the paid job, your hours, or how we treat you
- Research and training on our own internal systems and on problems we set, never billable client work
- Yours to keep. Anything you build in that time goes in your portfolio and you can talk about it anywhere
- You can stop whenever, without a reason or a conversation
We would rather spell that out now than have you work out the shape of it in month three.
Why bother
You would work with the owner, not three layers below him. The dashboards and automation you build are the ones the business actually runs on, not an intern project invented to keep you busy. You would see how AI tooling gets used by a company that has to pay for it and live with the output, which looks very little like the demos. And you would leave with a written reference and specific work you can point at.