Working towards a better tomorrow 

For our clients, we focus exclusively on things that matter: new drugs, smart medical devices, better healthcare delivery, green technology — and everything it takes to bring them to market faster.

From engineering the AI core to product development, business strategy, go-to-market and organizational change, we collaborate with the most forward-thinking clients to drive positive change.

Technology needs strategy. Learn both.

The key to creating meaningful impact using technology is to combine an understanding of the bigger picture with a true appreciation of the crucial details. We focus on what matters most to make our clients successful: whether it’s cutting-edge engineering, business model validation or the next funding round.

With us, you have the rare opportunity to tackle everything from adaptive trial design to GDPR, cloud architecture, AI methodology, organization dynamics, maintainable code and healthcare business models. With experience, you can choose to specialize in either strategy work or solution building.

From internship to partnership

We offer a unique career path that takes you all the way from internship to partnership. Starting with hands-on experience solving client challenges, you take ownership of your work from the very beginning. As you manage increasingly complex projects, we support you in developing your area of expertise, building client relationships, and becoming a trusted advisor. 

Along the way, our supportive feedback-driven culture helps you grow, all while being backed by a grounded, fun and like-minded team. To thrive in this environment, we are looking for individuals who value curiosity, growth, and the willingness to roll up their sleeves.

Internships 2025 opening soon

Internships 2025 opening soon

Join us

We exclusively hire from our network of former interns.

Through our annual internship program, we are looking to meet exceptional people who could become part of our network.

As an intern, you will work on some of the most challenging and interesting problems at the intersection of AI and health, while learning from experienced mentors, participating in tailored training sessions and various other events.

Interns may be invited to stay on as student trainees, continuing to work with us while still studying. They get client exposure, structured career development, advanced training and the ability to grow their network.

Sign up to get notified as soon as the next program opens.

Frequently asked questions

  • Yes! We offer a Student Trainee role which provides structured career development, exposure to clients, advanced training and opportunity to grow their network. 

    However, the first step is to join as an intern, there is no direct application to the student trainee role. 

  • You can join through our annual internship program, where you’ll get to know us and the work we do. 

  • Fluent English is essential, and German is a big plus!

  • We work predominantly from our office in Berlin. This is the best fit for the type of work we do and the nature of our organization. That said, there is some flexibility but we are not embracing home office.

  • Your studies come first so we offer flexibility with a typical workday of around 8 hours.

🌱 Getting In & Starting 

  • In our apprenticeship-to-partnership model, individual development isn’t just encouraged – it’s essential. We grow as a company only as much as our people grow.

    Therefore, we have clearly defined career steps, a granular competence framework with transparent promotion criteria, supportive and open-minded mentors, regular feedback and training to support your development.

  • Our organization and career path follows the classic apprenticeship-to-partnership model common among architecture and law firms, as well as strategy consulting and venture capital. 

    This means that, without exception, everyone starts with hands-on client work, then learns to manage complex projects, before ultimately developing their own speciality and client segments. 

    You can think of this as developing your own business as a part of idalab, which approximately takes seven to ten years.

  • Career progression is very important to us, which is why we've developed tailored in-house training programs, and prioritize time to do them. They're designed to expose you early to the kinds of challenges and problems that most people only face after many years of experience.

    Our training covers a wide range of areas, including:

    • AI methodology & statistics

    • Professional software engineering & architecture

    • Conceptual and strategic thinking

    • Communications (visual, written, oral)

    • Leadership, presence, impact

🚀 Growth and Career

  • While we enjoy many team events and fun activities, what truly sets us apart is the unique blend of knowledge-sharing and community spirit that defines our culture.

    Every month, we host a Tech & Croissant morning: our way of catching up over breakfast while exploring the latest developments in the tech world. 

    Every Friday, we come together to close the week with an internal talk, covering recent client projects, current research and organizational development. These sessions are also a great opportunity to practice public speaking, we’d love for you to present your own work too! 

  • The typical number of people working on a single project range from two to four. Through the way we set up projects, we ensure that there’s always enough senior supervision for guidance and learning on the job.

  • We mostly work from our office, but travel to our clients for workshops and important meetings. We also try to provide this opportunity for our student workers, however in practice this is rare and will not intervene with your studies. 

  • We love making connections at the intersection of AI and life science. We host a regular event series with invited speakers (idalab Seminar), attend conferences, collaborate with the Berlin chapter of Nucleate, teach at university, sometimes even publish academic papers, and, every Christmas, collect money for the Schutzengelwerk. 

🧠 Culture and Daily Life

  • Yes, we also develop software tailored for our clients. Depending on the nature of the application and the context, we may either focus on the “AI core” (backend) or choose to develop the entire application ourselves (backend and frontend).

    However, we are not a product company, so we don’t develop software products that we sell to a broad range of clients.

  • We focus on developing solutions addressing the needs of our clients. To do so, existing AI algorithms are some of the building blocks, and we rarely develop novel methodology.

    However, our work almost always involves a lot of creative sophisticated quantitative modelling “around” standard algorithms, to address the actual problem at hand. This is an area that is largely out of focus within the AI research community, but no less intellectually challenging. 

    For example, imagine a scenario where you want to filter out irrelevant alarms in an intensive care unit based on real-time analysis of a patient's vital sign data. In a typical machine learning approach, this task might be reduced down to a binary classification problem (relevant vs irrelevant alarms), which ends with an AUC that seems “high”. But this is just the end of the beginning. How exactly does that classifier output translate into actions? Options include suppressing, prioritizing or delaying alarms – and possibly more. And how exactly does that result in workflow efficiency, better care, or cost reduction? 

    That entire process needs to be modelled quantitatively. How else can you decide, for example, whether it makes sense to invest time in increasing the AUC by 0.05? Which mode of intervention is the best? How to balance the different types of impact? Or for which patient segments, times of day, staffing cycles we need better data? 

  • Broadly speaking, the goal of strategy work is to advise our clients on what to do in specific situations, often with high uncertainty. As such, the topics can vary widely, for instance:

    • Validating business models for AI opportunities

    • Developing technical realization strategies in the context of complex legacy technology landscape

    • Figuring out how to best position and communicate AI and data assets in preparation for an IPO 

    • Due diligence of AI technology and teams

    • Organizational transformation of existing data functions towards AI product teams

    • Comprehensive AI strategy development 

  • In terms of overall time spent, the split is roughly 30% strategy and 70% solutions. Most of our projects have both strategy and solutions work streams.

  • What makes us special is that everyone, without exception, has an unusually broad generalist skill set, covering engineering, AI methodology, communication, strategy & concept and healthcare industry know-how.

    To achieve this, in the first years, everyone goes through the same training path, before joining either the strategy or the solution discipline. 

    Most of our projects have both strategy and solutions work streams, collaborating closely with each other.

💡 What You’ll Be Doing

  • In our project setup we have clearly defined roles, so not everyone is doing everything all the time, and to make space for focused deep work. We also spend a lot of time practicing clear and convincing communication, both on the job and in dedicated training sessions.

    However, it is very important for us to ensure that we all truly understand the challenge to be solved and its entire context. Therefore, everyone in our team can be client-facing, without exception. Sometimes we even fully embed ourselves within client teams. 

  • As in virtually all high-end professional services firms, there is no separate sales function. Instead, the responsibility for business development increases with seniority. 

    From early on, you will have full transparency into our business development activities and start to contribute to proposals already in your first years. Later on, we support your own initiative in developing your area of interest, such as focusing on the pre-clinical phase of drug development or methodology around AI implementation in medtech, or a particular segment of companies or situations.

đź“ž Clients and Communication

  • idalab is an independent, profitable, and team-owned company. We have no outside investors — and that's by design. This allows us to stay true to our purpose: building impactful, lasting solutions at the intersection of AI, healthcare, and life sciences; and taking a long-term view when investing in people.

  • Our clients span the full spectrum of the healthcare ecosystem. We work with leading pharmaceutical companies, BioTech innovators, MedTech firms, service providers, and life science venture capital investors. 

    Most of our partnerships are long-term collaborations, built on trust, results, and a shared commitment to making a difference.

  • In a world obsessed with technology for technology’s sake, we start with people.
    We believe that true innovation in healthcare depends not just on new tools, but on new kinds of minds — people who can see the big picture and dive deep into the crucial details, to cut through the complexity and make a real change.
    These generalists often find themselves stuck between worlds: too impact-oriented for academia, too long-term for venture building, and too hands-on for traditional strategy consulting.
    At idalab, we give them a home, with a long-term perspective that stays exciting, even 5 years in. . We build, we strategize, we make real impact — without losing the human touch.

🏛️ Structure and Philosophy