Berlin has the country's largest startup and scale-up scene, a real if overstated reputation for English-friendly work, and every year pulls thousands of new graduates and exchange students into competition for the same few thousand Werkstudent postings (a Werkstudent is the standard part-time role for enrolled students in Germany, capped at 20 hours a week during term time). That combination is worth understanding before you start applying.
This is the Berlin companion to our guide to Munich: same market, different city, different problems.
Who hires Werkstudenten in Berlin
Startups and scale-ups. Berlin has the largest concentration of venture-backed companies in the country, spanning fintech, e-commerce, delivery and climate tech, with names like Zalando, N26 and Delivery Hero headquartered here alongside hundreds of smaller, earlier-stage companies. These roles tend to hand you real responsibility fast. Pay is uneven: some match the corporates, plenty do not.
Tech and media. A deep pool of software, data and product roles, across both local startups and the Berlin offices of larger international companies. This is the closest thing Germany has to a genuinely international tech labour market.
Public sector and research. Federal ministries and several Max Planck and Fraunhofer institutes take on student assistants here, usually through formal, structured processes rather than a fast startup-style hire.
The universities themselves. TU Berlin, Freie Universität and Humboldt-Universität all run large research operations and regularly hire Werkstudenten into their own institutes and labs.
The traditional Mittelstand. Smaller here than in Munich, Stuttgart or the Rhine-Ruhr, but it exists, and it is far less competitive than the startup scene because fewer international students think to look there.
Where the roles actually get posted
Start with the Bundesagentur für Arbeit's job board: it carries far more listings than any startup job board, including the smaller and mid-sized employers who never bother with a paid one. Most students searching in Berlin skip it entirely and only ever see the startup-scene slice of the market as a result.
University career portals are the second-best source and the most underused. A posting on TU Berlin's or Humboldt's own board is aimed specifically at their students, which means a smaller, far less competitive pool than an open listing gets.
ProoV Jobs pulls from the same Arbeitsagentur data, filtered to Werkstudent, internship and entry-level roles, and matches each posting to a real project by actual skill overlap, so you can see at a glance which Berlin roles you can already evidence and which ones still need work.
Search terms that actually work
Search "Werkstudent" plus your field, in German: "Werkstudent Data", "Werkstudent Softwareentwicklung", "Werkstudent Marketing", "Werkstudent Controlling". The English equivalent returns a fraction of what the German term does, because the postings themselves are written in German even inside Berlin's most international companies.
Set a generous radius. Berlin is large and well connected by the U-Bahn and S-Bahn, and a posting in Potsdam or an outer borough draws noticeably fewer applicants than the same role listed in Mitte or Kreuzberg.
Pay varies widely, and startups are not always generous, but there is a floor: the statutory minimum wage, currently €13.90 an hour and rising to €14.60 from 1 January 2027. Anything offered below that is not legal, whatever the posting says.
The English question
Berlin's reputation as Germany's English-speaking city is deserved, relatively. Startups, in particular the venture-backed ones, run more of their internal work in English than almost anywhere else in the country. That is genuinely different from Munich, Frankfurt or the Mittelstand-heavy regions.
It is still not most of the market. Our analysis of the listings on the ProoV jobs board found that about 92.6% of Werkstudent listings nationally ask for German at B1 level or above, and Berlin lowers that share without coming close to reversing it. Treat a genuinely English-only listing as the exception you got lucky with, not the rule you can plan around.
What actually gets you through
Berlin's applicant pool is large, international and, on paper, remarkably uniform: comparable degree, comparable stage, comparable list of claimed skills. Ten generic applications sent into that pool mostly disappear without a reply.
One project you can point to does not. If a posting wants SQL, Python or a specific analysis method and your CV only claims it, you read exactly like every other application in the pile. If you can link a real, graded project in that skill, with a certificate the reviewer can check themselves, you have said something the other ninety applicants did not.
What to do this week
Run two or three saved searches on the official board with German field terms and a wide radius. Add your university's own career portal, and check it weekly rather than once. Shortlist a handful of postings you would genuinely take, read Ihr Profil on each, and note what keeps repeating. Then close the one requirement you cannot currently evidence, and apply with something to show for it.
