Cybersecurity Intern

Job Description:

Upbound Group Summer 2027 Internship – Cybersecurity

Upbound Group, Inc. (NASDAQ: UPBD) is a technology and data-driven leader in accessible and inclusive financial solutions that address the evolving needs and aspirations of underserved customers. The Company’s customer-facing operating units include industry-leading brands such as Acima, Brigit, and Rent-A-Center that facilitate consumer transactions across a wide range of store-based and digital channels, including over 2,300 company branded retail units across the United States, Mexico, and Puerto Rico. Upbound Group, Inc. is headquartered in Plano, Texas.

Upbound Group’s 2027 Summer Intern Program offers an immersive professional development experience that goes beyond traditional internships, providing participants with a comprehensive opportunity to grow both personally and professionally through dynamic networking events, engaging volunteer activities, and exclusive executive leadership speaker sessions. Interns can anticipate a robust learning environment that balances structured training modules with self-paced learning pathways, enabling them to explore their potential, develop critical skills, and gain meaningful insights into corporate culture.

The ten-week program will run from May 25 through July 30, 2027, and is an in-office experience at our company headquarters in Plano, Texas.

The Cybersecurity team’s job is to protect Upbound’s customers, employees, and brands from threat actors and fraudsters. This internship is part of how we bring AI into that work.

You’ll work as one team with the other cybersecurity interns, with a mentor from the Cybersecurity team, and build two things: an offensive harness that runs attacker techniques safely and measures how our detections respond, and a defensive harness that uses AI to help analysts triage alerts and recommend what to fix first.

You leave behind working code in our repository, documented and handed to the team that will run it after you go. This is new and interesting work, and your fresh thinking will help inject new ideas into our existing team.

Summer Interns at Upbound Group are paid hourly in accordance with usual payroll procedures.

$23.00 per hour

• Build the offensive harness: script MITRE ATT&CK techniques, run them in a test environment under agreed rules of engagement, and record whether each technique was detected and how quickly.

• Build the defensive harness: use LLMs and agents to draft alert triage for an analyst to review and to chain vulnerability findings into attack paths with a recommended fix order.

• Analyze what both produce: detection coverage against ATT&CK, time to detect, alert quality, and time to fix, and report what changed.

• Use AI coding tools every day and own what you ship: tests, code review, and documentation.

• Progress over perfection: ship a working first version early and improve it every week.

• Write the runbook, hand the tooling over, and demo it to cybersecurity leadership.

• You have built something with generative AI, such as an app on an LLM API or an agent, and you can show it.

• You use AI coding assistants, and you can explain what the tool wrote, what you changed, and why.

• You write Python, use Git, and can work with APIs and JSON. You know SQL and a data analysis library such as pandas.

• You can take a messy dataset, clean it, find what matters, and explain what you found.

• Coursework in Cybersecurity, Computer Science, Data Science, or a related field. Capture-the-flag experience, a home lab, or a security certification helps.

• Must be a rising Junior or above at an accredited four-year college or university.

• Cumulative grade point average of 3.0 or higher

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills

• Ability to work in our home office in Plano, Texas Monday through Friday

In your application, include a link to a repository, notebook, or write-up of something you built with AI.

To be eligible for this program, you must be authorized to work in the U.S. We do not offer any type of employment-based immigration sponsorship for this program. Likewise, Upbound Group will not provide any assistance or sign any documentation in support of any other form of immigration sponsorship or benefit including optional practical training (OPT) or curricular practical training (CPT.)

Upbound Group is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.