Space AI & Data Governance Intern

EU Satellite Centre (SatCen); Noordwijk; On-site; EUR 10,000 - 15,000; Full time

Job summary

European Space Agency (ESA) invites motivated university students to join the HRE-FI data lab internship in Noordwijk. You will gain hands-on experience in data wrangling, metadata design, and governance while working on real mission datasets and AI-ready workflows.

You will collaborate with engineers, scientists and IT specialists across disciplines, contribute to FAIR-aligned models, and prototype simple tagging or clustering tools under supervision. English required.

Qualifications

• University student in final or near-final year; must be enrolled for full duration of internship.
• Good knowledge of English or French; other ESA languages are an asset.
• Background in data science, data management standards, computer science, information engineering, or related field; Python/SQL experience is an asset.

Responsibilities

• Perform exploratory data analysis and metadata tagging on heterogeneous mission datasets (telemetry, experiments, reports, 3D models).
• Support cataloguing and profiling of data assets; identify structure, storage, and access methods.
• Help design a data categorisation and governance model aligned with FAIR principles.
• Contribute to automated workflows for metadata enrichment and data organisation.
• Assess potential of datasets for future AI/ML exploitation and digital twins.
• Support implementation of ESA AI study recommendations related to data infrastructure and readiness.
• Collaborate with colleagues across engineering, science, and IT to ensure consistency and avoid duplication.
• Optional stretch: develop small prototypes (tagging, clustering, text search) to demonstrate data preparation for AI.

Skills

Python

SQL

Data science

Data governance

English

French

Education

Master's student

Tools

Jupyter

Pandas

NumPy

Job description

European Space Agency (ESA) invites motivated university students to join the HRE-FI data lab internship in Noordwijk. You will gain hands-on experience in data wrangling, metadata design, and governance while working on real mission datasets and AI-ready workflows.

You will collaborate with engineers, scientists and IT specialists across disciplines, contribute to FAIR-aligned models, and prototype simple tagging or clustering tools under supervision. English required.