Internship: Anomaly Detection for Smart Maintenance

823 Damen Research Development & Innovation B.V.; Gorinchem; On-site; EUR 6,700 - 11,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Academic mentoring

Travel allowance

Tuition support

Research publication potential

Maritime exposure

Job summary

Damen Research Development & Innovation B.V. in Gorinchem hosts an internship on the Smart Maintenance project, focusing on anomaly detection in vessel systems. You will join a Data Science team applying AI to maritime operations and select a topic to strengthen the pipeline from data choice to reliable detection.

The role suits students pursuing a Bachelor or Master in data/engineering fields, with ML/time-series interest. English fluency is required, and the internship may include a thesis.

Qualifications

• Pursuing a Bachelor or Master in a technical field (data science, math, CS, engineering).
• Experience with statistics, Python, and ML/time-series is valued.
• Interest in predictive maintenance or industrial/marine systems.

Responsibilities

• Assist in ML-based anomaly detection for vessel equipment.
• Contribute to a research topic within the pipeline (data selection to detection).
• Preprocess and analyze sensor/time-series data from onboard systems.
• Run Python experiments and evaluate model performance.

Skills

Data Science

Python

Machine Learning

Time-series

Education

Bachelor or Master in Data Science/Math/CS/Engineering

Job description

We offer you an Ocean of Possibilities. Join our family.

About us

Damen aims to become the world's most sustainable and digitally connected shipyard. The Research, Development & Innovation (RD&I) department develops and implements the technology and know-how to achieve these ambitions. We actively assist the business in creating an innovative product portfolio and provide forward-thinking guidance to improve the quality and performance of Damen's products and services.

The role

You will be joining the Data Science team within Damen RD&I located in Gorinchem. Our department focuses on applying cutting-edge data and AI solutions to Damen's shipbuilding and maritime operations. The team includes domain experts in physics-informed machine learning, simulation acceleration, predictive maintenance, computer vision, and operational analytics. This internship is part of Smart Maintenance, a strategic project aimed at using AI to detect abnormal equipment behavior on board vessels before it leads to failure or unplanned downtime.

The role: As an intern, you will work on our Smart Maintenance project where we have developed an anomaly detection algorithm, which aims to help engineers spot early signs of equipment problems, such as engines, pumps, propulsion and cooling systems, before they escalation into failures. Vessels generate huge amounts of sensor data during operation, and our goal is to turn that data into reliable, trustworthy signals that support maintenance decisions. You will contribute to an existing pipeline that learns what "healthy" equipment behavior looks like and flags deviations from it. Your primary focus will be on a dedicated research topic, to be selected together with the team, that strengthens a specific part of this pipeline – from data selection to detection reliability, health trending, explainability, or deployment. There is room to shape the exact topic based on your interests and background, either before or shortly after you start. This can be a thesis/graduate internship and could start as soon as possible, depending on your availability.

Possible research topics that we offer, on which the final scope is to be defined together:

• Model transferability across vessels: exploring how an anomaly detection model trained on one vessel can be adapted to other vessels, machinery types, or operating environments – including retraining, recalibration, and drift detection strategies.
• Reliable anomaly detection: improving detection models to minimize false alarms, adapt to different operating conditions, handle transient events, and quantify prediction confidence.
• Health and degradation trending: moving beyond fault detection to identify gradual performance degradation, developing health indicators that give early warning of wear or efficiency loss.
• Explainable AI and fault diagnosis: making anomaly models explainable, identifying which sensors or components drive an alert, and supporting root-cause analysis for engineers.
• Defining "healthy" operation: identifying, selecting, and validating representative data from vessels operating under normal conditions, accounting for varying operating modes and environmental influences.

Key accountabilities

• Support the development and improvement of ML-based anomaly detection models for vessel equipment.
• Preprocess and analyze sensor/time-series data from onboard systems.
• Run experiments in Python, evaluating model performance against real and/or simulated data.
• Work closely with our Data Scientists, maintenance engineers, and vessel operations stakeholders.
• Document results and present findings to the team regularly.

Skills & Experience

• Is currently pursuing a Bachelor or Master in Data Science, Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, Mechanical/Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field.
• Ideally combines data science with a mechanical/electrical engineering background, with the ability to model equipment behavior and understand which sensors are informative for which failure modes.
• Has experience with Statistics, Python, and ideally with machine learning (LSTMs) or time-series analysis.
• Has an interest in predictive maintenance, sensor data or industrial/marine systems.
• Is comfortable working with real-world, sometimes messy, operational data.
• Communicates fluently in English.

What we offer

• Mentoring at academic level throughout the internship.
• Internship/graduation fee and travel allowance for the duration of the assignment.
• Opportunity to contribute to a high-impact predictive maintenance project used in real vessel operations.
• Research publication is likely possible with a possible extension of the internship period.
• Exposure to a multidisciplinary team combining data science and maritime engineering expertise.

Other

Are you ready to sail into your new adventure at Damen?

Due to housing issues we cannot accept international students that do not have accommodation in the Netherlands yet.

We are still growing and that gives you options. You contribute to this growth while benefitting from the diverse development and career opportunities that our company offers. We will continue to challenge you. With our extensive portfolio of products and solutions you will never get bored and never stop learning. We offer you a world of possibilities. Working at Damen means contributing to the highest quality in shipbuilding, with an eye to the future and future generations. We want to make the world a better place by becoming the most sustainable maritime solution provider. For that, we need you. Become part of our family. We are Damen. We’re a family company that has been building ships for almost 100 years. However, our focus is not on the past, however – we’re looking forward. Our ambition is to become the most sustainable and connected maritime solutions provider there is. To achieve this, we combine digital technology with our philosophy of standardised shipbuilding to offer a portfolio of services that takes care of vessels throughout the entire lifecycle. Working at Damen offers the best of several worlds. Active in more than 100 countries, with over 30 shipyards, we are internationally renowned for quality. And we are still growing, still innovating. Which means we will continue to challenge you. You will never stop learning, and you will never get bored – we promise you that. We offer you an ocean of possibilities. Join our family.