Senior Software Engineer, Scientific Computing

About the Company 

The mining industry has steadily become worse at finding new ore deposits, requiring >10X more capital to make discoveries compared to 30 years ago. The easy-to-find, near-surface deposits have largely been found, and the industry has chronically under-invested in new exploration technology, relying on the manual techniques of yesteryear – even as demand accelerates for copper, lithium, and other metals to build electric vehicles, renewable energy, and data centers.

KoBold builds AI models for mineral exploration and deploys those models—alongside our novel sensors—to guide decisions on KoBold-owned-and-operated exploration programs. In the six years since founding, KoBold has become by far both the largest independent mineral exploration company and the largest exploration technology developer. Our data scientists and software engineers, who come from leading technology companies, jointly lead exploration programs with our renowned exploration geologists.

KoBold has proven its first discovery with materially less capital than the industry average and found one of the best copper deposits ever discovered: the copper is far more concentrated than the global average of copper mines, and this asset alone is expected to generate meaningful revenue for decades. KoBold has a portfolio of more than 60 other projects, each of which has the potential for another high-quality discovery.

KoBold is privately held; investors include institutional asset managers T. Rowe Price and Canada Pension Plan Investments; technology venture capitalists Andreessen Horowitz, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, BOND Capital, Durable Capital, StepStone, and Standard Investments; and natural resources companies Equinor, BHP, and Mitsubishi.

About the Role

At KoBold we believe that a modern scientific computing stack will enable systematic mineral exploration and materially improve our rate of mineral discovery. This role is a key ingredient to this strategy. As a member of our scientific computing team, you will apply software engineering and machine learning to remote-sensing, drillhole, imaging, geophysics and other mineral exploration data in order to build scalable ML systems to help make high-speed, high-quality decisions for our mineral exploration projects. Collaborating with our exceptional team of data scientists and geologists, you will tackle complex scientific problems head-on and collectively pave the way for discoveries of vital energy transition metals like lithium, copper, nickel, and cobalt. Together we can shape the future of mineral exploration and contribute to building a sustainable world.

Responsibilities

• Architect, implement, and maintain foundational scientific computing libraries that will be used in KoBold’s mineral exploration analyses.
• Build tooling to increase the velocity of our machine learning progress, including enabling rapid prototyping in Jupyter notebooks; build experimentation, evaluation, and simulation frameworks; turning successful R&D into robust, scalable ML pipelines; and organizing models and their outputs for repeatability and discoverability.
• In collaboration with data scientists, build models to make statistically valid predictions about the locations of economic concentrations of ore metals within the Earth’s crust.
• Apply–and coach team members to use–engineering best practices such as writing robust, testable and composable code
• Collaborate with data scientists, geoscientists and engineers to invent the modern scientific computing stack for mineral exploration
• Occasional travel to exploration sites around the world to observe the impact of scientific computing on KoBold’s exploration products and design new technologies to further discovery.  Travel is approximately twice per year depending on project needs.

Qualifications

Our ideal candidate will have:

• At least 5 years of experience as a software engineer, data scientist or ML engineer, though most great candidates will have closer to 10. 
• Track record of building production quality data processing solutions or tooling that have delivered business value
• Proficiency with foundational concepts of ML, including statistical, traditional and deep-learning approaches
• Proficiency in Python, ideally including array-based packages such as xarray and numpy
• Deep experience with measured scientific data
• Experience in visualizing scientific data for domain experts
• Experience in MLops and in the making of robust ML systems
• Drive to increase the velocity and effectiveness of our data scientists in both experimental and production workflows 
• Capacity to dive deep on novel challenging problems in applying ML to mineral exploration, including understanding a complex domain of geology and mineral exploration practices as well as working with limited, disparate and noisy data sources 
• Collaborative attitude to work with stakeholders with different backgrounds (data scientists, geoscientists, software engineers, operations)

Work practices and motivation:

• Ability to take ownership and responsibility of large projects.
• Intellectual curiosity and eagerness to learn about all aspects of mineral exploration, particularly in the geology domain. Open to working directly with geologists in the field. Enjoys constantly learning such that you are driving insights and innovations.
• Ability to explain technical problems to and collaborate on solutions with domain experts who aren’t software developers. A strong communicator who enjoys working with colleagues across the company.
• Excitement about joining a fast-growing early-stage company, comfort with a dynamic work environment, and eagerness to take on a range of responsibilities.
• Keen not just to build cool technology, but to figure out what technical product to build to best achieve the business objectives of the company.
• Ability to independently prioritize multiple tasks effectively.

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, disability, or veteran status.

This position is Full-time

The US base salary range for this full-time exempt position is $170,000 - $215,000

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

Senior Software Engineer, Decision Science

About the Company 

The mining industry has steadily become worse at finding new ore deposits, requiring >10X more capital to make discoveries compared to 30 years ago. The easy-to-find, near-surface deposits have largely been found, and the industry has chronically under-invested in new exploration technology, relying on the manual techniques of yesteryear – even as demand accelerates for copper, lithium, and other metals to build electric vehicles, renewable energy, and data centers.

KoBold builds AI models for mineral exploration and deploys those models—alongside our novel sensors—to guide decisions on KoBold-owned-and-operated exploration programs. In the six years since founding, KoBold has become by far both the largest independent mineral exploration company and the largest exploration technology developer. Our data scientists and software engineers, who come from leading technology companies, jointly lead exploration programs with our renowned exploration geologists.

KoBold has proven its first discovery with materially less capital than the industry average and found one of the best copper deposits ever discovered: the copper is far more concentrated than the global average of copper mines, and this asset alone is expected to generate meaningful revenue for decades. KoBold has a portfolio of more than 60 other projects, each of which has the potential for another high-quality discovery.

KoBold is privately held; investors include institutional asset managers T. Rowe Price and Canada Pension Plan Investments; technology venture capitalists Andreessen Horowitz, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, BOND Capital, Durable Capital, StepStone, and Standard Investments; and natural resources companies Equinor, BHP, and Mitsubishi.

About the Role

At KoBold we believe that a modern scientific computing stack will enable systematic mineral exploration and materially improve our rate of mineral discovery. This role is a key ingredient to this strategy. As a member of our scientific computing team, you will apply decision science techniques in order to build scalable systems to help make high-speed, high-quality decisions for our mineral exploration projects. Collaborating with our exceptional team of data scientists, software engineers, and geologists, you will tackle complex scientific problems head-on and collectively pave the way for discoveries of vital energy transition metals like lithium, copper, nickel, and cobalt. Together we can shape the future of mineral exploration and contribute to building a sustainable world.

Responsibilities

• Architect, implement, and maintain decision science libraries that will be used in KoBold’s mineral exploration analyses.
• Build tooling to increase the velocity of our decision making, including enabling rapid prototyping in Jupyter notebooks; build experimentation, evaluation, and simulation frameworks; turning successful R&D into robust, scalable pipelines; and organizing ML models and their outputs for repeatability and discoverability.
• Apply–and coach team members to use–engineering best practices such as writing robust, testable and composable code
• Collaborate with data scientists, geoscientists and engineers to invent the modern decision science technology for mineral exploration
• Occasional travel to exploration sites around the world to observe the impact of scientific computing on KoBold’s exploration products and design new technologies to further discovery.  Travel is approximately twice per year depending on project needs.

Qualifications

Our ideal candidate will have:

• At least 5 years of experience in the field of decision science with a strong software engineering focus, though most great candidates will have closer to 10. 
• Track record of building production quality data processing solutions or tooling that have delivered business value
• Proficiency with foundational concepts of ML, including statistical, traditional and deep-learning approaches
• Proficiency in Python, ideally including array-based packages such as xarray and numpy
• Deep experience with measured scientific data
• Experience in visualizing scientific data for domain experts
• Experience in MLops and in the making of robust ML systems
• Drive to increase the velocity and effectiveness of our data scientists in both experimental and production workflows 
• Capacity to dive deep on novel challenging problems in applying decision science to mineral exploration, including understanding a complex domain of geology and mineral exploration practices as well as working with limited, disparate and noisy data sources 
• Collaborative attitude to work with stakeholders with different backgrounds (data scientists, geoscientists, software engineers, operations)

Work practices and motivation:

• Ability to take ownership and responsibility of large projects.
• Intellectual curiosity and eagerness to learn about all aspects of mineral exploration, particularly in the geology domain. Open to working directly with geologists in the field. Enjoys constantly learning such that you are driving insights and innovations.
• Ability to explain technical problems to and collaborate on solutions with domain experts who aren’t software developers. A strong communicator who enjoys working with colleagues across the company.
• Excitement about joining a fast-growing early-stage company, comfort with a dynamic work environment, and eagerness to take on a range of responsibilities.
• Keen not just to build cool technology, but to figure out what technical product to build to best achieve the business objectives of the company.
• Ability to independently prioritize multiple tasks effectively.

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, disability, or veteran status.

This position is Full-time

The US base salary range for this full-time exempt position is $170,000 - $215,000

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.

We are open to hiring at multiple levels for this role, depending on experience, impact, and demonstrated ownership. While this role is level-agnostic, it is best suited for engineers with experience owning and working in highly ambiguous problem spaces.

About the company: 

The mining industry has steadily become worse at finding new ore deposits, requiring >10X more capital to make discoveries compared to 30 years ago. The easy-to-find, near-surface deposits have largely been found, and the industry has chronically under-invested in new exploration technology, relying on the manual techniques of yesteryear – even as demand accelerates for copper, lithium, and other metals to build electric vehicles, renewable energy, and data centers.

KoBold builds AI models for mineral exploration and deploys those models—alongside our novel sensors—to guide decisions on KoBold-owned-and-operated exploration programs. In the six years since founding, KoBold has become by far both the largest independent mineral exploration company and the largest exploration technology developer. Our data scientists and software engineers, who come from leading technology companies, jointly lead exploration programs with our renowned exploration geologists.

KoBold has proven its first discovery with materially less capital than the industry average and found one of the best copper deposits ever discovered: the copper is far more concentrated than the global average of copper mines, and this asset alone is expected to generate meaningful revenue for decades. KoBold has a portfolio of more than 60 other projects, each of which has the potential for another high-quality discovery.

KoBold is privately held; investors include institutional asset managers T. Rowe Price and Canada Pension Plan Investments; technology venture capitalists Andreessen Horowitz, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, BOND Capital, and Standard Investments; and natural resources companies Equinor, BHP, and Mitsubishi.

About The Role:

In this role, you will partner with exploration and engineering teams to build reliable, scalable infrastructure that makes it easier to turn data and models into real-world exploration insights. You will improve observability, streamline MLOps workflows, and maintain shared tools like JupyterHub that enable faster experimentation and collaboration. Your work will help create a solid foundation for scientists and engineers to focus on discovery instead of infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate compute infrastructure that is both scalable and reliable to support critical services.
• Work closely with engineering teams to embed observability, reliability, and security throughout the software development process.
• Create and maintain automation for monitoring, deployments, and incident response to keep operations efficient and predictable.
• Lead or support capacity planning, performance reviews, and system tuning to ensure stable and efficient systems.
• Join the on-call rotation and take part in incident response, troubleshooting, and resolution.
• Develop and refine monitoring and alerting to catch issues early and reduce downtime.
• Establish and maintain disaster recovery and business continuity practices that protect the organization against failures.
• Regularly review and improve our tools and processes to strengthen system visibility and reliability.
• Investigate points of fragility in distributed systems and understand how complex systems behave under stress in order to improve resilience.
• Continually learn about mineral exploration through reading, discussions with exploration team members, periodic rotation on an exploration team and time in the field with geologists

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience as an Infrastructure Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer or in a similar role
• Strong scripting and programming skills (Python, Go, Java or JavaScript/Node.js)
• Experience with IaC tools like Terraform and container orchestration tools like Kubernetes and Docker
• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS
• Experience operating or administering JupyterHub in a multi-user environment
• Understanding of MLOps workflows, including model training, deployment, and related tooling
• Excellent communication & collaboration skills and a continuous improvement mindset
• Proven ability to troubleshoot complex issues and implement effective solutions
• Proven ability to thrive in dynamic and evolving environments, effectively navigating uncertainty and incomplete information.
• Proven ability to grow expertise, influence & educate others
• Comfortable making informed decisions with limited data, adapting quickly to new circumstances, and maintaining focus on strategic objectives while driving clarity for the team.
• Intellectual curiosity and eagerness to learn about all aspects of mineral exploration, particularly in the geology domain. Enjoys constantly learning such that you are driving insights through using our tools in exploration and willing to work directly with geologists in the field.
• Ability to explain technical problems to and collaborate on solutions with domain experts who are not infrastructure engineers. A strong communicator who enjoys working with colleagues across the company.
• Excitement about joining a fast-growing early-stage company, comfort with a dynamic work environment, and eagerness to take on an evolving range of responsibilities.
• Keen not just to build cool technology, but to figure out what technical product to build to best achieve the business objectives of the company.

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, disability, or veteran status.

This position is (Full-time Exempt)

The US base salary range for this full-time exempt position is $170,000 - $230,000.

Location: KoBold is a remote-first workplace. All candidates must be legally authorized to work in one of the following countries: United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa, United Kingdom, Zambia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Namibia, Finland, Sweden, or Botswana.

We are open to hiring at multiple levels for this role, depending on experience, impact, and demonstrated ownership. While this role is level-agnostic, it is best suited for engineers with experience owning production systems and working in highly ambiguous problem spaces.

Software Engineer

About the company: 

The mining industry has steadily become worse at finding new ore deposits, requiring >10X more capital to make discoveries compared to 30 years ago. The easy-to-find, near-surface deposits have largely been found, and the industry has chronically under-invested in new exploration technology, relying on the manual techniques of yesteryear – even as demand accelerates for copper, lithium, and other metals to build electric vehicles, renewable energy, and data centers.

KoBold builds AI models for mineral exploration and deploys those models—alongside our novel sensors—to guide decisions on KoBold-owned-and-operated exploration programs. In the six years since founding, KoBold has become by far both the largest independent mineral exploration company and the largest exploration technology developer. Our data scientists and software engineers, who come from leading technology companies, jointly lead exploration programs with our renowned exploration geologists.

KoBold has proven its first discovery with materially less capital than the industry average and found one of the best copper deposits ever discovered: the copper is far more concentrated than the global average of copper mines, and this asset alone is expected to generate meaningful revenue for decades. KoBold has a portfolio of more than 60 other projects, each of which has the potential for another high-quality discovery.

KoBold is privately held; investors include institutional asset managers T. Rowe Price and Canada Pension Plan Investments; technology venture capitalists Andreessen Horowitz, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, BOND Capital, Durable Capital, StepStone, and Standard Investments; and natural resources companies Equinor, BHP, and Mitsubishi.

We are hiring Software Engineers to accelerate our mission.

About The Role:

At KoBold, software engineers have the unique opportunity to embed directly with their users and learn the ins and outs of mineral exploration and geology while developing state of the art technology solutions. Unlike traditional software engineering roles, we don’t simply ship code and passively wait for feedback about its utility: our userbase includes our colleagues… and ourselves! While there are real technical challenges in making mineral exploration data broadly searchable and accessible to both humans and machines, we believe that solving these technical challenges cannot be done without “getting our hands dirty” – sometimes literally! – by embedding directly with the exploration teams and even occasionally (~once a year) joining our colleagues in the field, be it in Zambia, Canada, or Arizona, to experience the impact of our software in real time.

As a Software Engineer on the Data Systems Engineering team at KoBold, your main role will be to enable systematic exploration and materially improve exploration success rates by making mineral exploration data broadly accessible to humans and machines.  Past projects have included SIP (the Structured Ingest Pipeline), DataKit generation (producing curated sets of data on demand), and RAG (Retrieval Augmentation Generation, utilizing natural language processing on unstructured data). Our tech stack is primarily python and includes Django, React, AWS, and additional technologies like Retool and Prefect. 

Your work will empower KoBold to unlock invaluable insights and streamline intricate scientific processes. Collaborating with our exceptional team of data scientists, geologists, and other software engineers, you will have the opportunity to tackle complex problems head-on and collectively pave the way for the discoveries of vital energy transition metals like lithium, copper, nickel, and cobalt. Together we can shape the future of mineral exploration and contribute to building a sustainable world.

This role be responsible for:

• Deep engagement with exploration geologists and data scientists, continual learning about mineral exploration, and tailoring technology development to the needs of exploration project scientists
• Building data pipelines and tooling for deriving advanced human and machine insights from exploration data, often leading a small group of software engineers to successful delivery
• Developing expertise in KoBold’s Data Systems and deeply understanding how they impact exploration
• End-to-end ownership of projects from design to implementation and testing to continued engagement with colleagues on exploration teams using your solutions
• Responding well to design and code feedback, also providing feedback to teammates 
• Operationally managing the team’s services and assisting scientific colleagues with our tooling

Qualifications

• 4+ years of software engineering experience, ideally building production cloud data systems
• Proficiency with Python
• Ability to write production-quality code that is correct, readable, well-tested, scalable and extensible
• Skilled in large-scale system design
• A track record of taking ownership from definition of the problem and delivering projects with demonstrated impact in an iterative manner
• Intellectual curiosity and eagerness to learn about all aspects of mineral exploration, particularly in the geology domain. Enjoys constantly learning such that you are driving insights through using our tools in exploration and willing to work directly with geologists in the field.
• Ability to explain technical problems to and collaborate on solutions with domain experts who are not software developers. A strong communicator who enjoys working with colleagues across the company.
• Excitement about joining a fast-growing early-stage company, comfort with a dynamic work environment, and eagerness to take on an evolving range of responsibilities.
• Keen not just to build cool technology, but to figure out what technical product to build to best achieve the business objectives of the company.

Nice to Haves 

• Experience with modern frontend frameworks such as React
• Experience with geospatial data and building map-based experiences
• Familiarity with containerization and container orchestration platforms, such as Docker, AWS ECS, Kubernetes, etc.
• Formal education or job exposure to natural sciences

The UK base salary range for this full-time exempt position is $120,000 - $210,000 USD.

Location: Remote, Candidates can be located anywhere in the United Kingdom. 

Product Manager

About the company: 

The mining industry has steadily become worse at finding new ore deposits, requiring >10X more capital to make discoveries compared to 30 years ago. The easy-to-find, near-surface deposits have largely been found, and the industry has chronically under-invested in new exploration technology, relying on the manual techniques of yesteryear – even as demand accelerates for copper, lithium, and other metals to build electric vehicles, renewable energy, and data centers.

KoBold builds AI models for mineral exploration and deploys those models—alongside our novel sensors—to guide decisions on KoBold-owned-and-operated exploration programs. In the six years since founding, KoBold has become by far both the largest independent mineral exploration company and the largest exploration technology developer. Our data scientists and software engineers, who come from leading technology companies, jointly lead exploration programs with our renowned exploration geologists.

KoBold has proven its first discovery with materially less capital than the industry average and found one of the best copper deposits ever discovered: the copper is far more concentrated than the global average of copper mines, and this asset alone is expected to generate meaningful revenue for decades. KoBold has a portfolio of more than 60 other projects, each of which has the potential for another high-quality discovery.

KoBold is privately held; investors include institutional asset managers T. Rowe Price and Canada Pension Plan Investments; technology venture capitalists Andreessen Horowitz, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, BOND Capital, Durable Capital, StepStone, and Standard Investments; and natural resources companies Equinor, BHP, and Mitsubishi.

About the position 

A successful Product Manager at KoBold is relentlessly focused on discovering world-class mineral deposits. You will work closely with your engineering, geology, and data science colleagues to put a wide range of data types from a wide range of sources in the hands of scientists, and give them the tools to do cutting edge analysis on it. The result will be better daily decisions to best direct our exploration efforts: where to do surveys, collect samples, and drill. Your work will pave the way for a more abundant and sustainable supply of critical metals like nickel, lithium, and copper.

Responsibilities: 

• Decide what we’re going to build and why by developing conviction and getting everyone on board
• Learning the ins and outs of developing geological hypotheses and models by collaborating with geologists and data scientists on KoBold’s active exploration projects
• Joining field programs to experience the impact of technology—and to discover new possibilities—on how we gather new sources of information
• Developing strong beliefs about the how the next generation of deposits will be discovered and technology’s role in it
• Finding the gaps and bottlenecks in the team’s current practices and translating that into tangible technology goals
• Actively assess the ongoing exploration impact of our software through constant communication with teams as well as defining product metrics
• Produce mocks, prototypes, and wireframes to communicate your product vision
• Synthesizing your vision into documents and presentations for leadership, engineers, and other explorers
• Clearly stating the functional hypotheses that motivate our work, and prioritizing work to falsify them when they are uncertain.
• Strive to bring people together, rather than serve as an intermediary. At KoBold, we don’t have customers—we have colleagues—and PMs serve a uniquely interdisciplinary role in bringing colleagues together across disciplines.

Qualifications:

• Possess high technical aptitude. Our products are designed for the top data scientists and geologists in the world to collaborate on cutting-edge technologies. Candidates should have a degree in a scientific discipline, substantial work experience in a scientific field, or otherwise demonstrate their experience working on highly technical problems.
• Have at least 5 years professional experience with a technical product designed for scientists or data scientists.
• Intellectual curiosity and eagerness to learn about all aspects of mineral exploration, particularly in the geology domain. Enjoys constantly learning such that you are driving insights through using our tools in exploration and willing to work directly with geologists in the field.
• Ability to explain technical problems to and collaborate on solutions with domain experts who are not product managers. A strong communicator who enjoys working with colleagues across the company.
• Excitement about joining a fast-growing early-stage company, comfort with a dynamic work environment, and eagerness to take on an evolving range of responsibilities.
• Keen not just to build cool technology, but to figure out what technical product to build to best achieve the business objectives of the company.
• A valid passport and willingness to travel to observe our work at Mingomba or at an exploration site around the world. Travel for this role typically does not exceed 4 trips per year.

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, disability, or veteran status.

This position is Full-time Exempt

The US base salary range for this full-time exempt position is $155,000 - $225,000, plus equity and benefits including 401k matching.

Location:  Remote, Candidates can be located anywhere in the United States. All candidates must be legally authorized to work in the United States.

Engineering Manager, Data Systems

About the company: 

The mining industry has steadily become worse at finding new ore deposits, requiring >10X more capital to make discoveries compared to 30 years ago. The easy-to-find, near-surface deposits have largely been found, and the industry has chronically under-invested in new exploration technology, relying on the manual techniques of yesteryear – even as demand accelerates for copper, lithium, and other metals to build electric vehicles, renewable energy, and data centers.

KoBold builds AI models for mineral exploration and deploys those models—alongside our novel sensors—to guide decisions on KoBold-owned-and-operated exploration programs. In the six years since founding, KoBold has become by far both the largest independent mineral exploration company and the largest exploration technology developer. Our data scientists and software engineers, who come from leading technology companies, jointly lead exploration programs with our renowned exploration geologists.

KoBold has proven its first discovery with materially less capital than the industry average and found one of the best copper deposits ever discovered: the copper is far more concentrated than the global average of copper mines, and this asset alone is expected to generate meaningful revenue for decades. KoBold has a portfolio of more than 60 other projects, each of which has the potential for another high-quality discovery.

KoBold is privately held; investors include institutional asset managers T. Rowe Price and Canada Pension Plan Investments; technology venture capitalists Andreessen Horowitz, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, BOND Capital, Durable Capital, StepStone, and Standard Investments; and natural resources companies Equinor, BHP, and Mitsubishi.

About the role:

At KoBold, we believe making mineral exploration data broadly accessible to humans and machines will enable systematic exploration and materially improved exploration success rates. This role is a key ingredient to this strategy. As an early Engineering Manager on the Data Systems Engineering team, you will have the opportunity to shape how we build our product and organization to realize this vision. Through development of our robust data systems, we will empower KoBold to unlock invaluable insights and streamline intricate scientific processes. Collaborating with our exceptional team of data scientists and geologists, you will have the opportunity to tackle complex scientific problems head-on and collectively pave the way for the discoveries of vital energy transition metals like lithium, copper, nickel, and cobalt. Together we can shape the future of mineral exploration and contribute to building a sustainable world.

Responsibilities of this role include:

• Thoughtfully build and lead a team of high-performing software engineers, hiring and growing diverse individuals on your team
• Leverage your team in collaboration with data scientists, geoscientists, and other software engineers to plan, prioritize, and deliver impactful projects that accelerate our exploration efforts
• Work with the Head of Data Systems Engineering and interdisciplinary leaders across the company on our strategy to advance both our technical product and organization
• Collaborate with cross functional peers (geoscientists and data scientists) across the company, learning about mineral exploration. Coach your team to better partner across the company.
• Spend roughly 1/3rd of your time contributing to projects as an individual contributor

Qualifications

Our ideal candidate will have:

• 8+ years experience building production software systems
• 3+ years in an engineering leadership role with reports
• Experience building robust distributed cloud data systems. Bonus for experience building systems managing large geospatial or geoscientific datasets.
• Deep understanding of multiple database and data storage technologies
• A track record of taking ownership from definition of the problem and delivering large projects with demonstrated impact in an iterative manner
• Skilled at dealing with ambiguity and prioritizing effectively from multiple inputs 
• Formal education or job exposure to natural sciences

Work practices and motivation:

• Intellectual curiosity and eagerness to learn about all aspects of mineral exploration, particularly in the geology domain. Open to working directly with geologists in the field across the world. Enjoys constantly learning such that you are driving insights through using our tools in exploration.
• Ability to explain technical problems to and collaborate on solutions with domain experts who are not software developers. A strong communicator who enjoys working with colleagues across the company.
• Excitement about joining a fast-growing early-stage company, comfort with a dynamic work environment, and eagerness to take on an evolving range of responsibilities.
• Keen not just to build cool technology, but to figure out what technical product to build to best achieve the business objectives of the company.

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 $200,000-$240,000.

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.

We are open to hiring at multiple levels for this role, depending on experience, impact, and demonstrated ownership. While this role is level-agnostic, it is best suited for engineers with experience owning production systems and working in highly ambiguous problem spaces.

Software Engineer

About the company: 

The mining industry has steadily become worse at finding new ore deposits, requiring >10X more capital to make discoveries compared to 30 years ago. The easy-to-find, near-surface deposits have largely been found, and the industry has chronically under-invested in new exploration technology, relying on the manual techniques of yesteryear – even as demand accelerates for copper, lithium, and other metals to build electric vehicles, renewable energy, and data centers.

KoBold builds AI models for mineral exploration and deploys those models—alongside our novel sensors—to guide decisions on KoBold-owned-and-operated exploration programs. In the six years since founding, KoBold has become by far both the largest independent mineral exploration company and the largest exploration technology developer. Our data scientists and software engineers, who come from leading technology companies, jointly lead exploration programs with our renowned exploration geologists.

KoBold has proven its first discovery with materially less capital than the industry average and found one of the best copper deposits ever discovered: the copper is far more concentrated than the global average of copper mines, and this asset alone is expected to generate meaningful revenue for decades. KoBold has a portfolio of more than 60 other projects, each of which has the potential for another high-quality discovery.

KoBold is privately held; investors include institutional asset managers T. Rowe Price and Canada Pension Plan Investments; technology venture capitalists Andreessen Horowitz, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, BOND Capital, and Standard Investments; and natural resources companies Equinor, BHP, and Mitsubishi.

We are hiring Software Engineers to accelerate our mission.

About The Role:

At KoBold, software engineers have the unique opportunity to embed directly with their users and learn the ins and outs of mineral exploration and geology while developing state of the art technology solutions. Unlike traditional software engineering roles, we don’t simply ship code and passively wait for feedback about its utility: our userbase includes our colleagues… and ourselves! While there are real technical challenges in making mineral exploration data broadly searchable and accessible to both humans and machines, we believe that solving these technical challenges cannot be done without “getting our hands dirty” – sometimes literally! – by embedding directly with the exploration teams and even occasionally (~once a year) joining our colleagues in the field, be it in Zambia, Canada, or Arizona, to experience the impact of our software in real time.

As a Software Engineer on the Data Systems Engineering team at KoBold, your main role will be to enable systematic exploration and materially improve exploration success rates by making mineral exploration data broadly accessible to humans and machines.  Past projects have included SIP (the Structured Ingest Pipeline), DataKit generation (producing curated sets of data on demand), and RAG (Retrieval Augmentation Generation, utilizing natural language processing on unstructured data). Our tech stack is primarily python and includes Django, React, AWS, and additional technologies like Retool and Prefect. 

Your work will empower KoBold to unlock invaluable insights and streamline intricate scientific processes. Collaborating with our exceptional team of data scientists, geologists, and other software engineers, you will have the opportunity to tackle complex problems head-on and collectively pave the way for the discoveries of vital energy transition metals like lithium, copper, nickel, and cobalt. Together we can shape the future of mineral exploration and contribute to building a sustainable world.

This role be responsible for:

• Deep engagement with exploration geologists and data scientists, continual learning about mineral exploration, and tailoring technology development to the needs of exploration project scientists
• Building data pipelines and tooling for deriving advanced human and machine insights from exploration data, often leading a small group of software engineers to successful delivery
• Developing expertise in KoBold’s Data Systems and deeply understanding how they impact exploration
• End-to-end ownership of projects from design to implementation and testing to continued engagement with colleagues on exploration teams using your solutions
• Responding well to design and code feedback, also providing feedback to teammates 
• Operationally managing the team’s services and assisting scientific colleagues with our tooling

Qualifications

• 4+ years of software engineering experience, ideally building production cloud data systems
• Proficiency with Python
• Ability to write production-quality code that is correct, readable, well-tested, scalable and extensible
• Skilled in large-scale system design
• A track record of taking ownership from definition of the problem and delivering projects with demonstrated impact in an iterative manner
• Intellectual curiosity and eagerness to learn about all aspects of mineral exploration, particularly in the geology domain. Enjoys constantly learning such that you are driving insights through using our tools in exploration and willing to work directly with geologists in the field.
• Ability to explain technical problems to and collaborate on solutions with domain experts who are not software developers. A strong communicator who enjoys working with colleagues across the company.
• Excitement about joining a fast-growing early-stage company, comfort with a dynamic work environment, and eagerness to take on an evolving range of responsibilities.
• Keen not just to build cool technology, but to figure out what technical product to build to best achieve the business objectives of the company.

Nice to Haves 

• Experience with modern frontend frameworks such as React
• Experience with geospatial data and building map-based experiences
• Familiarity with containerization and container orchestration platforms, such as Docker, AWS ECS, Kubernetes, etc.
• Formal education or job exposure to natural sciences

The US base salary range for this full-time exempt position is $150,000 - $240,000.

Location: KoBold is a remote-first workplace. All candidates must be legally authorized to work in one of the following countries: United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa, United Kingdom, Zambia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Namibia, Finland, Sweden, or Botswana.