Associate Data Scientist

About the company: 

KoBold Metals Zambia is a Zambian-led company exploring for the ore deposits that will become the next generation of new mines in Zambia.

KoBold Metals Zambia is the Zambian affiliate of KoBold Metals, a U.S.-based company exploring around the world for battery metals using proprietary AI to guide exploration decisions. Our business is discovering, defining, expanding, and developing mineral resources, and our objective is to achieve a step-change improvement in exploration success resulting in more tier 1 resources discovered faster, with fewer failures, and with far less exploration capital.

KoBold is privately held and its investors include: institutional asset managers T. Rowe Price and Canada Pension Plan Investments; technology venture capitalists Andreessen Horowitz, Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures, BOND Capital, Standard Investments, and Sam Altman’s Apollo Projects; and leading natural resources companies Equinor, Mitsubishi, and BHP.

KoBold Metals Zambia is building a rapidly growing team of Zambian geologists, operators, and executives to identify, acquire, explore, and develop exploration opportunities and mineral resources drawing upon KoBold’s technology and the expertise of colleagues worldwide.

We are hiring an Associate Data Scientist to help accelerate our mission.

At this time, we are only accepting applications from Zambian nationals.

About the position

In this role, you will help develop software to accelerate discovery of battery metals by building a worldwide geospatial dataset that underlies our machine learning driven exploration program.

You will join an outstanding team of data scientists, geoscientists, and software engineers. You will be a core part of the exploration team, and your primary role will be to integrate data into TerraShed’s® databases using Python to perform QA/QC and exploratory data analysis. Further, you will add to KoBold’s codebase by contributing novel algorithms that accelerate the ingestion and transformation of myriad data sets. The datasets you curate will help other KoBold Data Scientists and Geologists leverage Machine Prospector® to solve challenging scientific problems, enabling the widespread adoption of electric vehicles.

Responsibilities

The Associate Data Scientist will:

• Process and integrate data into well-structured, curated, proprietary databases (TerraShed®) using Python

• Explore and assess the quality of  geophysical, geochemical, geologic, and other geospatial data from around the world

• Analyze data to identify potential measurement errors, missing data, inconsistencies with other datasets

• Work on an exploration project team and help Geologists discover pertinent geospatial insights from datasets 

• Work with other Data Scientists to build predictive models for finding ore deposits

• Work with Software Engineers to improve data ingestion and data engineering infrastructure

• Support other Data Scientists and Exploration Geologists with ad hoc geospatial analyses

Qualifications

A great Associate Data Scientist candidate will have:

• At least 1 year of experience programming in Python (or other scripting languages such as R or MATLAB), with an understanding of IDEs, data types, functions, classes, and libraries

• Experience working with geospatial datasets, with an understanding of coordinate systems and geospatial file types (vector, raster, delimited text, etc.)

• Experience using Git and GitHub to version control, contribute code, and collaborate with others on a remote repository

• Familiarity with SQL

• Experience using geospatial visualization tools (example: QGIS)

• A master’s degree or higher (or a bachelor’s degree with work experience) in the geosciences, physical sciences, engineering, computer science, or mathematics 

• Drive to self-teach programming fundamentals and learn KoBold’s code repositories

• Interest in a career in Data Science, Software Engineering, or GIS

• Enjoyment in getting the details right

We are committed to equal employment opportunities for all people.

This position is a full-time contract role.

Location: Lusaka, Zambia.