Data Science Intern

Korn Ferry • Chicago, IL

18h

About The Position

We are seeking a motivated Data Science and Engineering Intern to join Korn Ferry’s AI Strategy & Transformation team. This intern will work closely with data scientists, engineers, psychometricians, and product managers to support the design, prototyping, evaluation, and deployment of data-driven solutions that apply statistical methods, machine learning, and generative AI to talent and people-analytics problems. This is a learning-focused role: you will contribute to real projects, build prototypes and visualizations, and receive regular mentorship from senior team members. Why join us We’re a small, tight-knit team inside Korn Ferry that encourages moving fast, thinking big, and creating real business value. On the AI Strategy & Transformation team you’ll work at the intersection of people science and cutting-edge AI to glean the most actionable insights from complex data. Our work has high-visibility: you’ll collaborate directly with senior product and business leaders, contribute to decisions that influence Korn Ferry’s offerings, and see your ideas go from notebook to production. Our Data Korn Ferry maintains a rich collection of people and assessment data (psychometric assessments, multi-rater tools, a pay database, talent movement and organizational datasets). As an intern, you’ll get exposure to these datasets and learn how they are used to produce high-quality insights and visualizations in the People Analytics space. Context of the Role This internship offers hands-on experience with prototyping both machine learning models and AI applications while learning how to preserve the quality and integrity of established scoring and psychometric services. The intern will focus on exploratory predictive modeling work with large scale databases on talent and skills. Emphasis will be on projects that generate business value for our clients.

Requirements

• Currently pursuing a Bachelors, Masters, or PhD in Data Science, Computer Science, Statistics, Computational Social Sciences, or a closely related field.
• Hands-on coursework or research projects using Python or R for data analysis and machine learning.
• Experience with SQL for querying relational data.
• Experience creating data visualizations (Matplotlib/Seaborn/Plotly, ggplot2, Tableau/Power BI, or similar).
• Familiarity with Git/GitHub (commits, branches, pull requests).
• Strong curiosity, eagerness to learn, and good written/verbal communication skills.
• Ability to work collaboratively on a multidisciplinary team and to take direction from senior staff.

Nice To Haves

• Coursework, thesis/research, or project experience with machine learning (supervised learning, model evaluation) and/or exposure to generative models (transformers, LLMs, prompt engineering).
• Familiarity with cloud platforms (Azure/Azure ML)
• Prior research assistantships, internships, or practical experience prototyping analytics/ML solutions.

Responsibilities

• Support data science and GenAI projects by preparing and cleaning datasets, conducting exploratory analyses, and producing summary reports.
• Build and document reproducible prototypes in Python for model experiments, simple ML models, and GenAI proof-of-concepts under senior guidance.
• Assist in training, evaluating, and comparing models and summarizing for review.
• Help evaluate generative AI outputs for quality, alignment with ethical guidelines, and fit for HR/talent use cases; participate in prompt engineering and iteration.
• Create clear visualizations and presentations (dashboards, charts, slide decks) to communicate findings to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Maintain clean, versioned code in Git and follow team development practices (code comments, basic unit tests, notebooks with README).
• Participate in team meetings, sprint ceremonies and learning sessions; seek and act on feedback from mentors.

What This Job Offers

• Career Level: Intern
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees