Summer Data Science Intern – Earth Index Core Technology

Earth Genome - Remote - Summer 2026

About the Role

Earth Genome is looking for a technically strong data science intern to spend the summer advancing the core capabilities of Earth Index, our AI-powered platform for environmental mapping built on geospatial foundation models. Rather than applying Earth Index to specific domains, you'll be working on the engine itself, helping us understand how to make it faster, smarter, and more versatile.

You'll tackle research-oriented engineering problems: designing benchmarking frameworks, experimenting with embedding fusion strategies, building post-processing pipelines, and exploring new capabilities like change detection. This is ideal for someone who wants to go deep on foundation models, embeddings, and evaluation methodology in a real product context. You'll report to Earth Genome's Science and AI Lead and work closely with our data science and engineering team.

Responsibilities

• Help design and build a comprehensive benchmarking suite for evaluating foundation models against Earth Index use cases, including defining metrics, curating evaluation datasets, and implementing reproducible evaluation pipelines
• Experiment with approaches for combining embeddings from multiple foundation models, exploring ensemble methods, learned projections, and other fusion strategies to improve detection quality
• Develop and test workflows for post-processing Earth Index detections, including clustering, filtering, confidence scoring, and spatial analysis to turn raw model outputs into clean, actionable results
• Explore advanced embedding applications such as change detection (comparing embeddings across time) and multi-scale search (working across different spatial resolutions)
• Write clean, well-documented, shareable code that integrates with existing Earth Index codebases
• Document experimental results, design decisions, and methodology clearly enough that the team can build on your work after the internship ends

What We're Looking For

• Currently pursuing (or recently completed) a graduate-level degree in computer science, machine learning, data science, or a related quantitative field
• Solid Python skills and experience working with ML frameworks (PyTorch, scikit-learn, etc.)
• Project experience in machine learning, particularly in areas like embeddings, computer vision, or model evaluation
• Comfort working with large datasets and familiarity with concepts like vector similarity search, dimensionality reduction, or transfer learning
• Experience with remote sensing or geospatial data
• Methodical, experiment-driven mindset; you document what you try, not just what works
• Ability to work independently, manage your own time, and communicate progress clearly in a distributed team

Why Work With Us

• Work at the intersection of foundation model research and real-world product development - your experiments will directly shape how Earth Index evolves
• Gain deep experience with geospatial foundation models, a rapidly growing area at the frontier of AI and remote sensing
• Join a small team where you'll have real ownership over meaningful technical problems, not toy projects
• Contribute to open-source, mission-driven technology that supports climate action, conservation, and environmental justice
• Build connections across a network that spans AI research, environmental science, and international policy

Job Details

• Term: Mid-May through early August, 2026 (negotiable)
• Location: Remote
• Stipend: $4000 one time payment
• Travel: None required. Travel costs will be covered for Earth Genome offsites and any relevant workshops.