We improve lives

The IDB Group is a community of diverse, versatile, and passionate people who come together on a journey to improve lives in Latin America and the Caribbean. Our people find purpose and do what they love in an inclusive, collaborative, agile, and rewarding environment.

About this position

The IDB Group is looking for an active graduate student ound to be hired as an intern under the Consultant modality. 

The 2027 Winter Internship Program is a competitive paid opportunity, based in Headquarters, for university students from member countries to learn about development work and corporate management of the Bank, and to acquire work experience at the professional level through on-the-job learning.

The Institutional Capacity of the State Division (ICS) is seeking a graduate intern to support its Transparency and Integrity thematic area. The intern will help develop and test artificial intelligence (AI) tools that make it easier to find, organize, and analyze information from large collections of government, administrative, and public records. Working alongside specialists in governance, data, and technology, the intern will support efforts to transform documents and databases into practical tools that help users identify connections, answer complex questions, and uncover patterns that would otherwise be difficult to detect. This includes helping to improve data quality, linking related information from different sources, and contributing to user-friendly applications that allow non-technical experts to access and use information more effectively.

Specifically, the intern will support the design and prototyping of AI applications and interfaces that operate over large administrative and documentary databases. The work focuses on three connected areas: (i) retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and graph-based retrieval (GraphRAG), combined with AI agents; (ii) AI-assisted extraction that turns digitized text and PDF collections into structured, query-ready datasets; and (iii) intelligent linking of related databases — including recovery from human data-entry errors in names, addresses, and geographic references — so that the resulting network of relationships can be analyzed and surfaced to users through well-designed interfaces.

These capabilities will be applied to financial integrity use cases that are a priority for the region: financial intelligence analytics, anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT), traceability of financial transactions, and identification of ultimate beneficial owners across corporate, procurement, registry, and sanctions-related data sources. The intern will therefore see how AI methods translate into concrete tools that help supervisory authorities, financial intelligence units, and integrity teams detect risk patterns and follow the money across fragmented datasets. Prior knowledge of AML/CFT is not required — curiosity about the domain is.

What you’ll do

• Support the design of implementation blueprints and reference architectures for AI applications and interfaces that query, join, and present large structured and unstructured data sources used in financial intelligence and integrity analysis.
• Prototype retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and graph-based retrieval (GraphRAG) pipelines end to end — parsing, chunking, embedding, indexing, hybrid search, re-ranking, and citation of sources — over knowledge graphs of persons, companies, accounts, transactions, and jurisdictions, and measure retrieval quality against defined benchmarks.
• Design, program, and evaluate AI agents and orchestrated multi-step workflows (tool use and function calling, guardrails, human-in-the-loop checkpoints, and automated evaluation harnesses), applying responsible-AI safeguards on privacy, explainability, and auditability that are appropriate for sensitive regulatory contexts.
• Build pipelines that transform digitized documents (PDFs, corporate filings, registry extracts, free text) into structured databases, and support entity resolution and record linkage that reliably matches records affected by human errors in name spelling, transliteration, addresses, identifiers, and geocoding.
• Explore AI-assisted network analysis over the linked databases — centrality, community detection, link prediction, and anomaly detection — to reveal ownership chains, control structures, and transaction paths, and document the work through architecture and data-flow diagrams, reproducible repositories, and presentations for technical and non-technical stakeholders.

What you'll need

• Education: An active graduate student (master’s or Ph.D.) in an engineering-based field preferred, including Computer Science, Software, Systems, Industrial or Electrical Engineering, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Applied Mathematics, Computational Statistics, or other related fields, from an accredited University. The graduation date should be after the Internship period.
• Languages: Fluency in English with a working knowledge of one other Bank language (Spanish, French, or Portuguese) is a plus.
• Key Skills: Learn continuously, collaborate and share knowledge, focus on clients, communicate and influence, innovate and try new things
• Soft Skills: Result-driven, collaborative, innovative, client-oriented, strong communicator, self-motivated, eager to learn, and excellent time management skills.
• Technical skills: Strong programming skills in Python and SQL; experience working with structured and unstructured data; familiarity with machine learning and large language model (LLM) applications; understanding of databases and data modeling; experience using APIs and Git-based version control; and the ability to clearly document technical work and communicate findings. Experience with AI application development, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), vector search, knowledge graphs, document processing, or network analysis is desirable. Familiarity with tools such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, Elasticsearch, Neo4j, Streamlit, and related technologies is a plus, but candidates are not expected to have expertise in every tool listed.
  • AI development environments and coding agents: including Claude (Claude Code, Cowork, Agent SDK, and the Model Context Protocol), OpenAI (API, Agents/Assistants, structured outputs), and comparable platforms.
  • Agent and RAG frameworks: LangChain, LangGraph, LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel or equivalents; evaluation and observability tooling such as Ragas, DeepEval, LangSmith, or Langfuse.
  • Search and retrieval at scale: Elasticsearch or OpenSearch (BM25 and kNN hybrid search, aggregations, index design) and vector stores such as pgvector, FAISS, Qdrant, Weaviate, or Pinecone.
  • Graph databases and network analysis: Neo4j and Cypher, Apache AGE or Amazon Neptune; NetworkX, igraph, or Graph-tool for network metrics; PyTorch Geometric or DGL for graph machine learning and link prediction; GraphRAG implementations (Microsoft GraphRAG, LlamaIndex property-graph index).
  • Document AI and text-to-data: Azure AI Document Intelligence, AWS Textract, Google Document AI, Tesseract, Unstructured, Docling, or LayoutLM-family models; schema definition and validation with Pydantic or JSON Schema.
  • Financial-integrity data and standards (desirable): familiarity with open corporate and beneficial-ownership data and registry datasets, and payment message standards such as ISO 20022; exposure to AML/CFT analytics or transaction-monitoring concepts is a plus, not a requirement.
  • Interfaces and visualization: Streamlit, Gradio, or Dash for rapid prototypes; basic React/Next.js for application interfaces; Power BI, Plotly; and graph visualization with Cytoscape.js, Gephi, or similar.

Requirements

• Citizenship: Be a national of an IDB member country.
• Active student: An active graduate student (master’s or Ph.D.) pursuing a degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Statistics, or a related quantitative field. The graduation date should be after the Internship period.
• Consanguinity: Not have family members (up to the fourth degree of consanguinity and second degree of affinity, including spouse) working at the IDB or IDB Invest.
• First job at the IDB Group: Be a first-time participant in an Internship Program held by the Bank or Inter-American Investment Corporation (“Corporation” also known as “IDB Invest”). In addition, you have not been a former staff member, Complementary Workforce (“CW”), contractor for the Bank or the Corporation, or have previously provided services to the Bank or the Corporation through a contractor or under any other contractual modality.

  Notes:

  • Submit your resume, academic transcripts (official or unofficial), and university letter certifying your student status when applying.
    • If you submit an unofficial academic transcript at the time of applying, you will be requested to present an official one if moving forward.
  • Academic transcripts and university letters should be issued within the last three months.
    • For graduate students a minimum of 50% of coursework must be completed when applying.
  • Applications without the requested documentation will be disqualified.
  • Save each file in a PDF format with your name and subject.
  • DO NOT send copies of your degree certificates or other courses.
  • You must be available to work full-time (40 hours per week) from January 16th to March 15th, 2027. These dates are fixed and cannot be modified. Interns must complete their assignments within this period.
  If you are an international student in the U.S.A., your work authorization is through CPT or OPT. Consult your school advisor before applying. You must be able to work 40 hours per week, many international students are limited to working part-time, depending on their academic standing

Type of contract and duration

• Type of contract: Intern Consultant
• Length of contract: Two (2) months
• Dates of the contract: January 16th to March 15th, 2027
• Location: Washington, D.C. – United States of America.

*Internship dates may be adjusted slightly to accommodate holidays.

Our culture

At the IDB, we work so everyone brings their best and authentic selves to work while finding their purpose. Our people consistently strive for excellence, and we recognize and celebrate the impact of their contributions.

In our efforts to drive innovation, we intentionally include all voices, cultivate a sense of belonging and champion fairness. We welcome individuals from underrepresented groups to join us and share their unique perspectives.

We ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodations to participate in the job interview process. If you require an accommodation to complete this application, please email us at accommodations@iadb.org.

About the IDB Group  

About the IDB Group   

The IDB Group, composed of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), IDB Invest, and the IDB Lab offers flexible financing solutions to its member countries to finance economic and social development through lending and grants to public and private entities in Latin America and the Caribbean.    

About IDB   

We work to improve lives in Latin America and the Caribbean. Through financial and technical support for countries working to reduce poverty and inequality, we help improve health and education and advance infrastructure. Our aim is to achieve development in a sustainable, climate-friendly way. With a history dating back to 1959, today we are the leading source of development financing for Latin America and the Caribbean. We provide loans, grants, and technical assistance; and we conduct extensive research. We maintain a strong commitment to achieving measurable results and the highest standards of integrity, transparency, and accountability.   

About IDB Invest 

IDB Invest, a member of the IDB Group, is a multilateral development bank committed to promoting the economic development of its member countries in Latin America and the Caribbean through the private sector. IDB Invest finances sustainable companies and projects to achieve financial results and maximize economic, social, and environmental development in the region. With a portfolio of $14.1 billion in asset management and 325 clients in 25 countries, IDB Invest provides innovative financial solutions and advisory services that meet the needs of its clients in a variety of industries. 

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