Intern, for a research project “The Kiel Military Procurement Tracker”

The Kiel Institute for the World Economy is looking for an **Intern (m/f/div), full-time (38.7h/week) or part-time** for our research project **“The Kiel Military Procurement Tracker”**, ideally starting in **December 2026**. The position can be based in Kiel or in Berlin and can be carried out remotely. We are a policy and research-oriented team working on defence economics, European rearmament, and the fiscal and industrial dimensions of security policy. Our work combines original data collection with economic analysis and feeds directly into the European policy debate. The intern will actively participate in the further development of the Kiel Military Procurement Tracker, a dataset that systematically and comparably records military procurement by European countries. **Building and extending this database will constitute a big part of the project.** The data underpin the Kiel Report series and our policy work on how European defence procurement can become faster, cheaper and more innovative. ### **Your Role:** * Involvement in a research project with high political relevance and visibility in the European defence policy debate * The opportunity to build data pipelines from scratch and to shape how the tracker is collected, validated and published * Insights into quantitative work and state-of-the-art research, using Python, R, Stata and modern tooling for web scraping and LLM-based information extraction * An open and international work environment in a team of motivated researchers, research assistants and interns * Attendance of various Kiel Institute seminars and participation, upon agreement, in courses offered by the Kiel Institute's Advanced Studies Program (ASP) and Kiel Institute summer schools * Flexible working arrangements: full-time (38.7h/week) or part-time, based at our Kiel or Berlin office or fully remote. ### **Your Profile:** We are looking for a student who * has a sound academic background in economics, data science, computer science, political science, international relations, security studies or a related field * has practical experience with web scraping and with collecting data from unstructured sources (HTML, PDF, tender portals, APIs) * has solid programming skills in Python (R or Stata are also welcome), exceeding the knowledge gained in a university class * is familiar with modern, AI-assisted approaches to data collection — for example using large language models to parse and structure documents — or is eager to learn them quickly * works accurately and in a structured manner, and understands that a procurement database depends on careful source documentation and validation * is motivated and proactive and does not hesitate to propose ideas to move the project forward * is able to think critically and independently and perform tasks responsibly and reliably * has an interest in the work of the Kiel Institute and in defence economics, European security and industrial policy * has very good English language s