Data Scientist - Sustainable Investing

Join Our Team as a Sustainable Data Scientist in Rotterdam

Department Overview

To further strengthen our capacities in serving clients with world-leading sustainable investment expertise, we are looking for a Sustainable Data Scientist based at our office in Rotterdam. You will become part of the Robeco Indices team, which is responsible for the construction and management of four types of index products – factor indices, sustainable indices, thematic indices, and bespoke indices. Together these capabilities encompass more than EUR 50 billion in assets under advice. The global index landscape is a highly competitive area with heavy regulatory requirements. As such, we are looking for ambitious, analytical, and highly precise candidates.

In your role, you will liaise closely with the Sustainable Investing (SI) Thought Leadership team, which is responsible for developing, maintaining, and monetizing SI frameworks, such as Sustainable Development Goal scores and forward-looking climate, biodiversity, and social metrics. You will drive the integration of SI frameworks into Indices solutions and contribute to further development of these frameworks by applying data science and AI techniques. In the first year of the job, you will be part-time seconded to the SI Thought Leadership team to gain deep familiarity with the diverse SI frameworks.

The work is characterized by a high degree of independence, as well as cooperation with colleagues from within the team and various departments. Your projects and research insights will have the opportunity to directly contribute to our long-term investment philosophy, enhance our technological infrastructure, or improve the relevant index strategies.

Position & Requirements

What will you do:

• Design and implement AI/ML models to collect, impute, and score companies from both structured and unstructured sources (e.g., corporate disclosures, websites, PDF reports, APIs).
• Build pipelines to extract, clean, and validate environmental and social metrics using LLM-based tools.
• Collaborate on the development of proprietary scoring models and frameworks.
• Implement rigorous versioning, audit trail, and model documentation to comply with the EU’s regulation.
• Contribute to governance processes ensuring methodological transparency, reproducibility, and regulatory alignment.
• Support client deliverables including dataset licensing, whitepapers, index construction inputs, and model explainability tooling.

What we are looking for in a candidate:

• MSc in Computer Science, Data Science, Econometrics, AI, Applied Mathematics, Sustainable Finance, or a related field.
• Around 5 years of experience in data science roles, ideally in financial services.
• Strong proficiency in Python.
• Experience with one of the following: NLP, OCR, document parsing, large language models (LLMs), or ML-based estimation techniques is a plus.
• Familiarity with ESG, climate, or corporate sustainability data (e.g., GHG emissions, SDG mapping, CSRD, EU Taxonomy) is preferred but not required.
• Strong understanding of data governance, model validation, and reproducibility in regulated environments.
• Ability to work across teams with a hands-on, problem-solving mindset.

All applications will be treated with the utmost confidentiality. An assessment and integrity test may be used in the selection procedure.

About Robeco

As a Dutch asset manager operating globally, Robeco has always combined the best of both worlds. We have global reach and ambitions, while retaining our head office in our hometown of Rotterdam. Employees at Robeco share that combination: we hire and nurture people who can think internationally and put the client first, while keeping their feet firmly on the ground. We have strong links with academia, which underpin the research in our robust quantitative and sustainability investing strategies. Our people have backgrounds in finance but also in economics and geography. Likewise, as pioneers in emerging markets investing, our diverse backgrounds also add local knowledge. We offer an informal and flexible office atmosphere that gives people the room to be themselves, to grow and to perform to the best of their ability.