Data Scientist Intern

Duration: 3 Months Internship → Full-Time Conversion (Performance-based)

Stipend: Starting from ₹30,000 (paid at the end of the internship period of 3 months). The final amount will be confirmed in the offer letter.

Location: Remote / Hybrid (Delhi–Bhubaneswar)

Start: Immediate

Role Overview

We are looking for a technically strong Data Scientist Intern with deep foundations in data engineering, ingestion systems, and applied machine learning for intelligence workflows.

This role combines:

• High-throughput data ingestion
• Intelligence-grade pipeline engineering
• Feature extraction & representation
• Similarity modeling & clustering
• Pattern analysis & explainability

This is not an academic research role. It is not dashboard-oriented.

It is execution-heavy, system-level, and designed for real-world intelligence data operating under noise, ambiguity, and adversarial conditions.

You will work on systems that:

• Ingest large volumes of heterogeneous data
• Enforce strict data integrity & provenance
• Transform raw inputs into structured intelligence
• Generate embeddings & similarity clusters
• Detect patterns, anomalies, and narrative shifts
• Produce explainable outputs for decision support

This role has a clear path to full-time conversion based on technical ownership, modeling rigor, analytical clarity, and reliability under production conditions.

Core Responsibilities

A. Data Engineering & Ingestion Systems

• Design, build, and maintain data ingestion pipelines for heterogeneous sources
• Implement web scraping systems across:
• Surface web
• Deep web
• Dark web (Tor-based or restricted sources where applicable, ethical & compliant use only)
• Build robust scrapers with failure recovery and retry logic

B. Data Transformation & Feature Engineering

• Clean and normalize unstructured text data
• Extract entities (locations, organizations, dates)
• Engineer structured signals from noisy inputs
• Implement geo-scoring and relevance filtering logic
• Build keyword expansion and semantic filtering layers
• Handle encoding issues, multilingual normalization, and tokenization challenges

C. Embeddings, Similarity & Clustering

• Generate semantic embeddings from text content
• Evaluate embedding quality and drift
• Implement similarity search and clustering (e.g., DBSCAN, HDBSCAN, Agglomerative, K-Means where justified)
• Detect emerging patterns across clusters
• Identify noise vs signal within large datasets
• Handle high-dimensional vector data efficiently
• Implement cluster validation metrics and distribution checks

D. Pattern Detection & Explainability

• Perform cluster-level pattern analysis
• Identify dominant themes and narrative direction
• Detect escalatory language or coordinated signals
• Assign risk categorization (low / medium / high) with justification
• Build explainable outputs instead of black-box results
• Provide confidence scoring mechanisms
• Document reasoning behind each pattern conclusion

E. System Thinking & Model Discipline

• Maintain reproducibility of experiments
• Version datasets and pipelines
• Implement deterministic model pipelines where required
• Handle data drift and schema drift
• Design systems assuming adversarial or misleading inputs
• Balance performance, correctness, and interpretability

Required Technical Skills (Must-Have)

Programming & Engineering

• Strong Python (production-quality, modular, testable code)
• Experience with web scraping frameworks:
• Requests / HTTPX
• BeautifulSoup / lxml
• Playwright / Selenium (headless browsing)
• Experience scraping dynamic and non-trivial sources:
• JS-rendered pages
• Auth-gated or rate-limited sites
• Multi-language content

Data Systems

• Strong understanding of ETL / ELT concepts
• Experience building batch processing systems
• Failure recovery and idempotent design
• Familiarity with PostgreSQL (or similar relational DBs)
• Experience working with structured + unstructured data
• Experience designing append-only / immutable data systems

Proxy & Network Awareness

• Experience with proxy infrastructure (residential / rotating)
• Basic understanding of CAPTCHA handling and anti-bot systems
• Awareness of fingerprinting and rate-limiting behavior

Machine Learning & Similarity

• Experience generating embeddings (Open-source or API-based)
• Understanding of cosine similarity and vector search
• Experience implementing clustering algorithms
• Understanding of noise handling in unsupervised learning
• Ability to evaluate clustering quality

Required Technical Skills (Good to Have)

• Experience with Tor / onion services (ethical & compliant usage only)
• Experience scraping research portals, tenders, or institutional datasets
• Exposure to FastAPI or backend API systems
• Experience with vector databases
• Exposure to ANN search (HNSW / FAISS)
• Basic NLP experience (entity extraction, language detection, normalization)
• Experience with multilingual embeddings
• Familiarity with model explainability concepts
• Understanding of adversarial ML risks

What Makes You a Strong Fit

• You think in systems, not scripts
• You prefer correctness over hacks
• You understand that noisy data is more dangerous than missing data
• You can explain your model outputs clearly
• You question assumptions instead of blindly optimizing metrics
• You design for scale, failure, and auditability

Conversion Criteria for Full-Time Role at Ortus (After 3 Months)

• Accountability and execution discipline
• Stability and robustness of pipelines built
• Quality of embedding + clustering logic
• Analytical depth in pattern detection
• Ability to independently own data sources end-to-end
• Clean, auditable, intelligence-grade outputs
• Reliability under scale and adversarial conditions
• Clear documentation and reproducibility

About Ortus

Ortus Innovation is a deep-tech AI company building indigenous intelligence systems for India’s defence and internal security ecosystem.

We transform complex, multi-source information into structured, explainable intelligence that enables faster, better decisions in high-risk environments.

Ortus means new beginnings. We represent a shift away from siloed, imported, black-box systems toward secure-by-design, auditable, adaptive systems built specifically for Indian operational realities.

If you are looking for a comfortable analytics internship, this role is not for you.

If you want to build real intelligence systems from ingestion to pattern detection, this is where you start.