Internship: Data Science, Social Innovation, and Special Projects Team

Job Description

Work Location: New York

Expected duration: Duration: 2-6 months. Desired start date is 15 April 2026, or later.

Duties and Responsibilities

This internship is UNPAID and is designed to be in person and full-time (35 hours per week) on the United Nations premise (New York, USA). This internship can be adjusted based on the needs of the successful candidate to part-time (20 hours per week) and/or remote.

Full-time internship is for an initial period of two months, and a part-time internship is for an initial four months. Internships may be extended up to a maximum of six months, depending on the needs of the Division.

This internship is located in the Social Innovation and Special Projects Team (SISPT) in the Policy and Best Practices Service (PBPS), Division of Policy, Evaluation and Training (DPET) in the Department of Peace Operations (DPO).

The Policy, Evaluation and Training Division (DPET) is mandated to develop and disseminate the policy and doctrine guiding the work of Peacekeeping Operations. In addition, the division has the responsibility to evaluate, at the request of the heads of the departments, how those policies are being applied, gather lessons learned and best practices, and use that information to guide the development, coordination and delivery of standardized training, so as to complete the learning cycle. DPET is also responsible for developing and maintaining strategic cooperation with various UN and external partners.

The Policy and Best Practices Service (PBPS) is part of the Policy Evaluation and Training Division (DPET) of the Department of Peace Operations. It provides support to both DPO and DOS. The core function of PBPS is to help improve the efficiency and effectiveness of peacekeeping operations through the exchange of good practices between missions, the development of guidance material that reflects lessons learned, and thematic policy support in selected areas. PBPS also leads several reform processes.

The intern will contribute applied research at the intersection of multilingual NLP, cross-cultural AI alignment, and field-deployable computing. The work spans three broad areas:

• Prototyping portable computing and sensing capabilities for humanitarian data collection;
• Contributing to the data architecture and digital infrastructure that underpins the pilot;
• Designing inclusive, culturally grounded language technologies for low-resource and multilingual settings.

Within delegated authority, the intern will be responsible for the following duties:

• Support the design of a portable compute platform that integrates environmental, biometric, audio, and other sensor modalities for field data collection.
• Document hardware-software interface specifications and data schemas for multi-sensor ingestion.
• Explore applications relevant to humanitarian response, environmental monitoring, and community health.
• Contribute to the design of data pipelines, storage schemas, and governance protocols for the social innovation pilot.
• Prototype intelligent document retrieval and automated reporting capabilities.
• Apply principles of inclusion, integrity, safeguards, and sovereignty in the design of digital public infrastructure components.
• Help establish reproducible engineering practices (version control, documentation, quality checks) and prepare handover materials for the team.
• Research and develop approaches for multilingual language understanding and translation in low-resource peacekeeping contexts, including model selection, adaptation, and evaluation.
• Design and execute participatory methods for eliciting culturally specific norms, values, and linguistic patterns from underrepresented communities, drawing on established frameworks in value-sensitive design and community-centered AI alignment.
• Build and curate datasets that capture cultural and linguistic variation, including metadata on speaker context, register, and intent.
• Develop alignment and evaluation methodologies that account for cultural pluralism, measurement invariance, and cross-group validity.
• Contribute to a research paper documenting methods, experiments, and findings.

Qualifications/special skills

Applicants must meet one of the following requirements:

• (a) be enrolled in, or have completed, a graduate school programme (second university degree or equivalent, or higher).
• (b) be enrolled in, or have completed, the final academic year of a first university degree programme (minimum bachelor’s degree or equivalent).

Applicants to the UN Internship Programme are not required to have professional work experience. However, a field of study that is closely related to the type of internship that you are applying for is required.

Preferred fields include computer science, computational linguistics, machine learning, computational social science, or a related discipline. Candidates from social-science backgrounds (international relations, anthropology, linguistics) with strong computational skills will also be considered.

Applicants must be a student in the final year of the first university degree (bachelor or equivalent), Master’s or Ph.D. Programme or equivalent, or have completed a Bachelor’s, Master’s or PH.D. Programme. Do you meet any of the above criteria? If yes, please indicate which one and attach proof to the application. Please note that you will have to provide an official certificate at a later stage.

Experience with programming skills in Python, R or an equivalent programming language. Please provide a brief description.

Familiar with model fine-tuning, evaluation design, and alignment techniques. Please provide a brief description.

Experience with participatory or community-centered research methods is an asset. Please provide a brief description.

Have you completed a UN Internship before? If yes, please include the UN entity as well as concrete dates?

Experience with research experience in NLP, multilingual language modelling, or cross-lingual transfer. Please provide a brief description.

Languages

English and French are the working languages of the United Nations Secretariat. Fluency in spoken and written English is required for the internship. Knowledge of an additional official UN language is an advantage.

Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish are the official languages of the United Nations Secretariat.

Additional Information

The United Nations Secretariat is committed to achieving 50/50 gender balance and geographical diversity in its staff. Female candidates are strongly encouraged to apply for this position.

The United Nations does not financially remunerate interns. Costs and arrangements for travel, visas, accommodation, and living expenses are the responsibility of interns or their sponsoring institutions.

For internships in the United States of America, interns who are not United States citizens, permanent residents, or not currently in the United States on a nonimmigrant visa status will be required to obtain a G-4 visa. If already in the United States of America on another non-immigrant visa status other than G-4, interns will be responsible for ensuring that they have a valid visa and, if required, employment authorization, allowing them to undertake the internship.

For internships outside the United States, interns who are not citizens of the country, permanent residents, or not currently in the country’s nonimmigrant visa status will be required to obtain a valid visa and work permit, allowing them to undertake the internship.

The United Nations must ensure all applicants for an internship, regardless of citizenship or national origin, are authorized to work from the country where the internship will be undertaken either remotely, hybrid or on the UN-premise duty station. Before resuming an internship, the applicant must submit proof of visa and/or work authorization.

Applicants who have previously served six months, in total, as an intern in one or more UN Common Systems cannot be engaged as an intern.

Applicants who are children, siblings, and sons or daughters-in-law (including stepchildren, half-siblings, or stepsiblings) of an active staff member in a UN Common System cannot be engaged as an intern.

In your Motivational Statement, please indicate when you would like to start your internship. Please note that the start and end dates are flexible. A complete online application is required.

The Motivational Statement must also include:

• Title of degree you are currently pursuing.
• Graduation Date (When will you be graduating/have graduated from the programme?)
• Explain why you are the best candidate for this specific internship
• Explain your interest in the United Nations Internship Programme

In your online Personal History Profile, be sure to include all past work experiences, IT skills, and three references.

DEADLINE: March 30, 2026