Peraton Summer Interns Support Corporate Innovation and Customer Outcomes

Peraton’s summer internship program helps develop the next generation of the national security technical workforce while opening doors to career opportunities within the company.

In recent years, several students have worked on geospatial analysis for satellites, interacting directly with customers on their projects. The Landmark Ground Support Services (GSS) customer sponsored interns within the Integrated Intelligence System Program Office. The interns helped create an API dashboard that provides user interaction and feedback data, user demographics, product network traffic, clickstream heatmaps, as well as user survey results. Without security clearances, the interns instead used commercial data from Yelp as a proof of concept and presented their final product to the customer with a live demo.

Other interns worked at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, where they created workable prototypes for the Peraton Space Exploration Network Services and Evolution (SENSE) team. The Peraton SENSE team’s work includes performance characterization testing of modems to check for any discrepancies. One of the NASA missions that Peraton supports is Artemis II, which involves human spaceflight and, as a result, has extra precautions built in.

The SENSE interns built a waveform database and a result database, both of which can be used to identify signal communications issues. Each project served as a proof of concept that the Peraton team will incorporate in new software being developed. The interns had the opportunity to work closely with engineers, learn agile methodology, and participate in daily stand-up meetings.

Within Peraton’s Global Health and Financial Solutions sector, students supported new business growth by working under solutions architects, sales engineers, and product campaign managers. On the Social Security Administration (SSA) Suitability team, interns guided vendors and candidates through the suitability and onboarding process. The interns gained valuable skills in business operations, project management, client interactions, and business communications.

Elsewhere, interns worked with Peraton’s internal research and development (IRAD) team on a data fabric solution, ThreatBoard, learning cybersecurity best practices and how to improve security posture. Other IRAD projects that interns worked on involved cloud services and enterprise IT modernization. Some interns focused on fraud, honing their data science and engineering skills while building on existing machine learning work for a key customer. They were exposed to the capture and business development process, along with leading-edge tools like Dataiku and Snowflake.

Non-traditional internships

Local high school students from Fullerton and San Gabriel Valley partnered with Peraton mentors at the Deep Space Network (DSN) in Goldstone, California. These students experienced hands-on projects in the Facilities Engineering, Software Development, Network Engineering, and EHS Departments, culminating in a final presentation where the interns demonstrated their knowledge.

The DSN interns gained practical exposure to the STEM field and Peraton benefitted from the usable products they created, such as analysis on power transient events and a smart phone application allowing the user to quickly view the current DSN asset capabilities of the tracking network. Some students will continue working part-time while attending college.

Peraton also has a unique co-op program with Virginia Tech that lasts longer than the standard summer program. This eight-month hands-on program teaches students about software development and guides them through their early career journeys. Some students focused on front end development, such as JavaScript, electron, and Vue.js, a progressive JavaScript framework.

Other Virginia Tech students worked with Amazon Web Services for an IRAD that researched different forensics tools, implementing an agile workflow. They learned React development, the Agile development process, teamwork in software development, effective debugging techniques, JavaScript, C++, CSS, and PostgreSQL.

Discover internship & co-op opportunities at Peraton