Student Research Assistant (AI for evidence synthesis) Potsdam Institut für Klimafolgenforschung (PIK)

Research at PIK

The climate needs bright minds. The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) addresses crucial scientific questions in the fields of global change, climate impacts and sustainable development. It is one of the world's leading research institutions in its field and offers natural and social scientists from around the world an inspiring environment for excellent interdisciplinary research.

The Climate Economics and Policy research department, located at EUREF Campus in Berlin-Schöneberg, is offering an exciting opportunity to be part of the Evidence for Climate Solutions working group. We are currently looking for a Student Research Assistant (m/f/d) (Position number: 06-2026 SHK PATHFINDER) to support the PATHFINDER 2 project, among others, starting on 01.05.2026 or as soon as possible.

The position is funded for initially 1 year, with the possibility of extension. The remuneration is determined according to the guidelines of the TdL. The current hourly rate for a student assistant with a Bachelor's degree is 14,59 € (without a Bachelor's degree 13,98 €). This is a  part-time position with a working time of 10–20 hours per week.

Key responsibilities

• develop new features for our annotation platform and other tools
  support researchers that use our platform (analysis or project on-boarding)
• develop and maintain ‘living’ systematic maps (automatically fetch and classify new publications and integrate into our databases)
• integrate living synthesis pipelines into human-in-the-loop processes (e.g. Cochrane crowd or NACSOS)
  evaluate and develop automation tools for information extraction
• help us to unlock multi-lingual evidence synthesis
  improve our interactive climateliterature.org platform
  enhance our local database snapshot of OpenAlex with >480M records
• drive your own ideas that accelerate the evidence synthesis process

Your profile

We do not expect you to fulfil all requirements!

• Bachelor or Master student, enrolled at a German university
• Background in computer science, open-source projects, digital engineering, data science or related fields 
• Good software design skills and experience in building and maintaining data processing pipelines and REST-based systems 
• Web-based front-end development (esp. typescript, vuejs, webGL)
• Experience (theory & practice) with relational databases (esp. PostgreSQL)
• Strong interest (ideally experience) in information retrieval, data integration, machine learning/AI, LLMs, knowledge graphs 
• Excited to use vector databases, e.g. integrating deepset haystack for RAG
• Interested in experimenting with solr, postgres, vector stores, graph databases, knowledge graphs, huggingface 
• Interest in data science, clustering, topic models, classification, entity extraction and linking, high-performance compute cluster with high-end GPUs

We will jointly choose tasks based on your expertise and interests. Most important is a strong interest in scientific methods, a solid knowledge foundation (e.g. studying computer science, open source projects) and eagerness to learn. Applicants should reference prior programming experience, ideally linked to specific projects.

Your benefits

• ability to work independently and on your own initiative
• methodical and systematic approach and structured and goal-oriented thinking
• capacity to familiarise yourself quickly with new topics
• creativity and openness to new approaches
• high level of competence in oral and written German and English
• reliability, engagement, teamwork, and a high level of motivation

We offer

• Chance to be part of an engaged, interdisciplinary team
• Insights into a solution-oriented research project with several international partners and with immediate policy relevance
• Opportunity to tackle challenges of climate change and our common future
• Flexi-time and mobile working (up to 50% of your hours)
• Collective pay scheme, benefits, subsidized travel card / Deutschland-Ticket Job
• Possibility to write an exciting master’s thesis under our co-supervision closely related to your work in the field of web science
  
  

PIK values equality and diversity. We encourage applications without photo. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment regardless of ethnic and social origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, care responsibilities, or age. PIK seeks to increase the share of women in scientific positions and therefore explicitly encourages women to apply. In cases of equal qualification and within the given legal scope, women will be given preference. PIK also encourages applications by parents returning from parental leave.

Please explicitly acknowledge in your motivation that you know you have to be enrolled in a German university throughout the entire contract and that the work place is in Berlin Schöneberg (only partial mobile working possible).