Hiring: Cybersecurity Research Assistant Company: Axle Location: Rockville, MD Job Posted Time: 2026-09-03 10:58:20 Employment Type: Remote Target Skills & Keywords : Accessibility, Ansible, Bash, Configuration Management, DNS, Git, Grafana, Kubernetes, LLM, Linux, Program Management, Prometheus, Python, RHEL, Security Clearance, TCP/IP, TLS, Terraform, Ubuntu About the job Experience: •Any exposure to NIST security standards, security frameworks, or compliance work, including academic exposure. •A home lab, capture the flag participation, open-source contributions, or a personal project you can walk us through. •Any experience with Prometheus, Grafana, Elastic, or another monitoring or logging platform. •Curiosity about large language models and about building tools with them. Prior AI experience is not expected. You would learn that here. •Prior work at NIH or another federal agency, or familiarity with federal IT environments. Required Skills: •Implement assigned security controls as configuration changes across our Kubernetes, Linux, database, and model-serving environments, working from the control catalog and an assigned task list. •Build out and operate monitoring and detection coverage, including metrics collection, dashboards, log aggregation, and alert routing. •Run vulnerability scanning across container images, hosts, and application dependencies on a set schedule, track findings to closure, and keep the plan of action and milestones current. •Write and maintain the automation that applies hardening baselines and checks them for drift, using Ansible and Python. •Contribute to secrets management, network policy, and role-based access control work across the cluster environments. •Build the deterministic collectors that gather control evidence, including cluster API queries, policy engine reports, scan output, access control dumps, and database configuration exports, normalized into a common format and stored with timestamps. •Architect and deliver the internal AI tooling that assists with this work, including retrieval over the control catalog and system documentation, drafting from collected evidence, and triaging scanner output into ranked findings for human review. •Keep security documentation in agreement with the deployed configuration, and raise discrepancies promptly through your supervisors. Qualifications: •Dependent Care Assistant Program (DCAP) •Axle is seeking a Cybersecurity Research Assistant to join our vibrant team supporting rare disease research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This is a Remote position within the United States. •Axle supports AI research systems that run on on-premises Kubernetes clusters and shared high-performance computing infrastructure. This role implements and monitors defined security controls across that environment, and helps develop AI tooling that assists with developing and maintaining cybersecurity controls. •Associate’s or Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Cybersecurity, Information Systems, or a related field. We will consider equivalent professional experience or a completed technical certification program in place of a degree. •Solid functional working knowledge of Linux system administration, ideally on RHEL based systems such as Rocky Linux, and on Ubuntu. •Basic understanding of networking, including TCP/IP, DNS, TLS, firewalls, and how a request travels from a browser to a service. •Basic familiarity with containers, and real interest in learning Kubernetes. We will teach it. You should want to learn it. •Operational familiarity with version control and comfort working in a shared Git repository. •Demonstrated capacity to follow a written procedure precisely, and to notice when the procedure itself is wrong. •Clear written communication. A large part of this role is documenting what was done and why. Compensation: •100% Medical, Dental & Vision Coverage for Employees Interested candidates, please apply directly through the job posting on company's career page or try via AI auto apply on this platform. Don't miss this opportunity to join a forward-thinking team!