2025 Summer Digital Research & Development Internship

Background & Purpose of the Job

Unilever is one of the world’s leading suppliers of Food, Refreshments, Health & Wellness, and Home and Personal Care products with sales in more than 190 countries. In the United States, some of our brand icons are: Axe, Degree, Dove, Dove Men+Care, Hellmann’s, Nexxus, Shea Moisture, TRESemmé and Vaseline. All of the preceding brand names are trademarks or registered trademarks of the Unilever Group of Companies. We are a purpose led and future fit organization developing our brands for people’s lives today and for the changing environment tomorrow – aiming to make sustainable living commonplace. Unilever offers vast and exciting career paths within R&D. Creating new innovations, delivering consumer benefits, and enhancing our brands as a force for good – it’s all yours in Unilever R&D working in a digital research role. As a digital research summer intern at Unilever you will learn how we develop cutting-edge digital tools and generate leading technical insights to drive product innovation in either the skin care, skin cleansing, hair, or deoderant teams. Your work will guide the development of the latest technologies, deliver breakthrough cosmetic and health benefits, and bring innovations to life for our consumers.

What You’ll Do

With guidance from a manager and team of functional experts, summer interns will manage one major summer project on their own in a digital R&D role. This project will address a major technical challenge and opportunity for one of Unilever’s major hair, skin cleansing, or skin care brands or businesses. Interns will carry out the project within teams of scientists that support regional or global Unilever business groups.

Possible project topics include

- Applying artificial intelligence tools to generate market insights that will guide our product development teams.

- Guiding strategic approaches to product quality issues in some of the largest consumer products in the world by modeling processing and formulation variables across numerous data streams.

- Generating new insights from consumer, clinical, and product application data to elucidate new approaches to delight our customers.

In any project, interns will learn to apply data science and other digital approaches to the unique challenges of consumer product development spanning consumer preference, product development, and manufacturing. The work will involve both the application of digital approaches and storytelling to convey their value to the overall Unilever business. The work will have an appreciable on-site component that may extend into working in laboratory and pilot-plant facilities. Interns can expect to learn the specific programs or tools available needed to execute their research program. Interns will be given access to numerous data streams and develop ways of working to generate insights from the data. Interns will plan approaches, analyze their data using statistical and graphical tools, and generate predictive models. Interns will generate input and incorporate feedback from a cultivated network of technical experts within Unilever to enhance the delivery on their project.

Who You Are

You’re a born leader: You will lead your own project

You’re a dot connector: You will solicit the input of technical experts, apply digital tools to the design of experiments, generate insights from your data, and provide recommendations that meet business objectives

You’re a story teller: You will present your project to senior management

You’re a culture & change champion: You bring your own experiences and uniqueness to the team, which is valued in our inclusive work environment

What You’ll Need to Succeed

• Undergraduate with sophomore or junior status majoring in statistics, computer science, data science, artificial intelligence or related.

• Strong interest in the practical application of statistical and machine learning techniques to solve concrete problems in a dynamic business environment.

• Familiarity with programming in Python, R, and/or Julia.

• Coursework or project