KoBold Metals is a mineral exploration company using AI to explore for the metals we need for our transition to a low-carbon economy. KoBold’s business is discovering, defining, expanding, and developing mineral resources, and KoBold’s objective is to achieve a step-change improvement in exploration success: we aim to discover more tier 1 resources, faster, and with fewer failures.
KoBold has a global portfolio of more than 50 exploration properties targeting nickel, copper, cobalt, and lithium, which range from 100%-owned to partnerships with both majors, junior explorers, and prospectors.
Our team includes the best of the industry in exploration geoscience, data science, software engineering, operations, and business personnel. Prior to joining KoBold, KoBold team members have made nearly 20 discoveries. Our exploration programs are co-led by our geoscientists and data scientists, who develop exploration hypotheses, rigorously quantify uncertainty in our understanding of the subsurface, and design data collection programs that most effectively reduce uncertainty, drawing upon a large suite of proprietary exploration technology built by our data scientists and software engineers. Our field programs validate and improve the system and have demonstrated material improvements over conventional exploration methods
KoBold is privately held and our investors include: institutional asset managers T. Rowe Rice 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.
About The Role:
One of KoBold’s core beliefs is that we need a modern ML stack to enable systematic mineral exploration and materially improved success rates. This role is a key ingredient to this strategy. It combines software engineering, machine learning and scientific computing to create robust data transformation and ML pipelines and help make high-speed, high-quality decisions for our mineral exploration projects.
Responsibilities of this role include:
- Architect, implement, and maintain a set of foundational scientific computing libraries, for example distributed large-scale raster processing, that will be used in all of Kobold’s data analyses
- In collaboration with data scientists, develop a range of data processing, statistical, and physics-based techniques for geoscientific data — from computer vision to geophysical inversions.
- In collaboration with other engineers, build ML tooling to increase the velocity of our machine learning progress, including enabling rapid prototyping in Jupyter notebooks; building experimentation, evaluation, and simulation frameworks; productionizing successful R&D as robust scalable ML pipelines; and organizing models and their outputs for repeatability and discoverability.
- Apply and coach team members to use engineering best practices such as writing testable and composable code
- Collaborate with data scientists, geoscientists and engineers to invent the modern ML stack for mineral exploration
Qualifications
Our ideal candidate will have:
- At least 5 years of experience as a software engineer, data scientist or ML engineer.
- Track record of building production ML solutions or tooling that have delivered business value
- Proficiency in Python
- Proficiency in a variety of parallel computing patterns, for example using distributed computing frameworks such as Dask
- Understanding of scientific computing and machine learning algorithms
- Flexibility to engage with data scientists and increase their productivity for both experimental and production workflows
- An open-mind and curious attitude to learn and embrace the unique challenges of applying machine learning to mineral exploration, such as limited groundtruth data, complex quality metric design, and difficulties to create generalizable models
- Collaborative attitude to work with stakeholders with different backgrounds (data scientists, geoscientists, software engineers, operations)
- A Bachelor’s degree in the physical sciences, engineering, computer science, or mathematics.
KoBold Metals is an equal opportunity workplace and an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity for people of any race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, marital status, national origin, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, or veteran status.
The US base salary range for this full-time exempt position is $160,000-$225,000.
Location: Remote, Candidates can be located anywhere in the United States or Canada. All candidates must be legally authorized to work in the United States or Canada.
