Ramapo DMC - CFA Infrastructure Internship

Ramapo DMC / Center for Food Action Internship Opportunity

The DMC Center has one paid internship opening on the Center for Food Action (CFA) Data Excellence project — one of the DMC’s flagship Community Impact Projects. This intern will join an active student development team and take on a foundational role: unifying a growing suite of real-world applications into a cohesive, production-ready infrastructure. Read on for project details and how to apply.

About the Center for Food Action

The Center for Food Action is a New Jersey nonprofit providing food assistance and support services to thousands of families across Bergen and Passaic counties. CFA operates multiple pantry locations and relies on accurate data to run its operations, report to funders, and serve its clients effectively.

The DMC Center has been building CFA’s data infrastructure since Phase 1 — a time-series inventory database, a pricing module, a barcode scanner for bulk donation intake, and an analytics dashboard. Phase 2 has expanded that work significantly, with a dedicated team of student interns building applications now actively in use at CFA’s Mahwah and Saddlebrook locations.

The Existing Team

This intern joins a team of three active Phase 2 interns, each working on a distinct application strand:

• Inventory intake and barcode scanning — integrating the DMC scanner directly with PantrySoft via API to automate donation data entry at the warehouse level
• In-kind donor tracking — streamlining drop-off intake, generating electronic confirmations, and pricing donations using the Phase 1 pricing module
• Service analytics and data reporting — working directly with CFA staff across locations to build and refine reports that drive operational decisions

These applications were developed rapidly to meet real CFA needs. The new intern’s role is not to add another application strand — it is to step back and work at the infrastructure level to unify what has been built into a platform that can be maintained, extended, and deployed more broadly.

What You’ll Be Working On

A significant pattern emerging across the DMC’s Community Impact Projects is that common functional building blocks — user account management, intake workflows, automated notifications, reporting, and data export — are appearing independently in multiple applications built for different organizations. The intern in this role will work to identify, consolidate, and standardize these shared components into a coherent shared architecture.

This work has direct real-world stakes: the DMC is actively deploying applications to additional nonprofit partners, and a unified infrastructure dramatically reduces the cost and effort of each new deployment.

Primary Responsibilities

• Audit the existing CFA application suite — codebase review, dependency mapping, documentation of current architecture across all active apps
• Identify duplicated logic and overlapping patterns across applications (authentication, communications, reporting, data models)
• Re-architect shared components into reusable modules with clean, well-documented interfaces
• Improve deployment infrastructure — environment consistency, configuration management, and deployment workflows across hosted applications
• Collaborate with the existing intern team to ensure refactored components integrate cleanly with their active work
• Contribute to technical documentation to support long-term maintainability

Stretch Goals

• Help extend the unified architecture to support deployment to additional DMC partner organizations (FCDC, CUMAC, and others in the pipeline)
• Contribute to the Shared Pricing Module — a reusable pricing component with applications across CFA, MEVO, and other DMC partners

Internship Details

• Start Date: May 2026 (flexible)
• Duration: 12–15 weeks
• Hours: 15 hours/week
• Scheduling: Flexible; may extend into summer as needed
• Location: Primarily remote; some on-site visits to CFA Mahwah may be expected

Who Should Apply

Applicants should be current sophomores or juniors in Computer Science, Cybersecurity, or Data Science. Programming experience is required; web application development experience is strongly preferred. The skills below reflect preferred background — not requirements. Breadth and a systems-level mindset matter more than any single tool.

Preferred skills:

• Web application development (Node.js preferred; other frameworks welcome)
• Database design and SQL
• General full-stack experience
• Experience reading and working within an existing codebase
• Version control (Git)

Significant pluses:

• Interest in software architecture, refactoring, or platform thinking
• Deployment and DevOps experience (Linux, nginx, environment configuration)
• Prior internship or project work outside coursework
• Cybersecurity coursework or experience

How to Apply

Email sfrees@ramapo.edu with the subject line: “CFA Internship Application”

Include:

• A brief introduction — your name, class year, and major
• A short paragraph on why this project interests you
• A summary of relevant skills and experience (coursework, projects, jobs, or certifications)
• A current résumé or CV

Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis. Apply early — the position will be filled as soon as the right candidate is identified.

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