About Us: Children’s Funding Project is a nonprofit social impact organization that helps communities, states, and Native Nations expand equitable opportunities for children and youth through strategic public financing. Through our hands-on technical assistance and collection of resources, we help advocates, policymakers, public agencies, Tribal Nations, and funders identify and align existing funding, generate new revenue, and implement strategies to administer funds in ways that maximize their impact. This growing organization is dynamic and seeks to meet the needs of the child and youth field and provide a healthy work environment.

About the Position: Children’s Funding Project is seeking a data scientist intern to join our Fiscal Data Infrastructure Team for a 4–6-month internship starting in June 2025. As a data scientist intern, you will have a crucial role in helping us build our organization’s data infrastructure. The data team at Children’s Funding Project works to clean, extract, and classify hundreds of thousands of Federal, state, and local funding streams that serve children and youth. In this role you would use your data engineering, NLP, and programming skills to help expand our capabilities to build large-scale pipelines to process text data, extract new elements, and build features used by our fiscal mappers and across the Fiscal Data Infrastructure team. Additionally, you’ll support the implementation of data quality standards across our fiscal map products and provide administrative support including data cleaning, processing documentation, and data analysis. You will work closely with the Data Governance Manager and our team of State and Local fiscal mappers and product teams.

Responsibilities:

• Support Data Infrastructure:
  • Use NLP, machine learning, and large language methods to scrape and process hundreds of budget documents
  • Clean, classify and feature engineer using large-scale funding datasets
• Data Governance
  • Collaborate with fiscal infrastructure team and fiscal mappers to support and develop data-driven product solutions
  • Assist with data validation and quality assurance processes

Qualifications:

• Pursuing a degree in computer science, mathematics, or a similarly quantitative subject – data-science experience is a plus
• Experience in using NLP and ML methods to clean and categorize raw data is a must
• Experience with data processing and analysis (Python, R, or something similar) to clean and wrangle data (structured and unstructured)
• Experience in supervised and unsupervised machine learning and deep learning methods
• Basic knowledge of database systems (SQL)
• Strong problem-solving skills and attention to detail
• Team-oriented attitude with an ability to work both collaboratively and independently in a remote environment (e.g., experience completing group projects at school, co-developing and editing documents or presentations online, taking online courses)
• Ability to work independently in developing advanced data models and coordination of outputs into cohesive databases.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working in Azure or other cloud computing platforms
• Experience building dashboards
• Interest in public policy, government finance, or work that sits at the intersection of public policy, education, child and youth advocacy)

Time Commitment, Compensation, and Location:

• 20-30 hours per week for up to 6 months. Starting and ending dates and weekly work schedules can be flexed to accommodate time zone differences, as well as classwork and other commitments
• Compensation is $20 per hour
• This is a fully remote internship. Work may be performed anywhere within the United States.

Application Process

To apply submit your resume and cover letter via email to [email protected]

Children’s Funding Project commits to building a diverse, equitable, and inclusive work environment that reflects the breadth of communities and clients we serve. We are an equal opportunity employer dedicated to hiring socially conscious individuals with diverse experiences and knowledge that deepen our organization’s impact. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. People of color, members of Tribal Nations and Native communities, LGBTQ-identified people, gender-nonconforming people, people with disabilities, veterans, and people who speak a language in addition to English are strongly encouraged to apply.