Staff ML Data Scientist

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 Rice 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:

Hyperspectral airborne and satellite images, radar, lidar, and radiometrics offer a tremendous amount of information for modeling the Earth’s crust to discover mineral resources to enable the energy transition. KoBold has developed a set of algorithms to inform and guide our mineral exploration programs. These algorithms cover the continent scale to the centimeter scale and range from physical models of transmission through the atmosphere to modern multi-modal machine learning pipelines processing terabytes of data from multiple sensors. We use our algorithms to guide helicopter supported field programs in the arctic and sample collection in remote deserts. Our initial exploration successes have inspired us to increase our commitment to remote sensing data science. We are deploying the second generation of a custom airborne hyperspectral and lidar system through 2025 and beyond.  

Reporting to the VP of Technology, responsibilities of this position include:

Technical execution

• Architect, implement, and maintain foundational data science models for distributed processing of large-scale geospatial data with direct application to Kobold’s mineral exploration projects and deep collaboration with geoscientists.
• In collaboration with our engineering team, build tooling to increase the velocity and rigor of our machine learning capabilities to derive insights from remote sensing data
• Improve upon current processing pipelines for lidar, high resolution imagery, and hyperspectral data
• Push the state of the art in analysis capabilities by implementing statistically rigorous spatially aware clustering, anomaly detection, and other analysis methods
• Collaborate with data scientists, geoscientists and engineers to invent and deploy algorithms that combine large and complex data sets for mineral exploration and discoveries 

Team leadership

• Lead and grow the team of 3-6 field engineers and data scientists collecting and processing terabytes of hyperspectral and lidar data around the globe.
• Run our global airborne data collection program - working closely with internal mineral exploration teams, legal, contracting, and operations as well as external aviation partners to safely and successfully deploy our custom sensors, backhaul and rapidly process data.
• Lead the week-to-week working cadence and quarterly planning process - setting clear goals, timelines, and technical objectives - weighing company priorities and executing a roadmap to improve our capabilities to collect data and derive mineral exploration insights.  

Qualifications

• Demonstrated ability to quickly absorb and synthesize complex information, with a track record of high intellectual rigor in a professional setting.
• Exceptional curiosity and eagerness to learn, with a proactive approach to exploring new concepts and technologies.

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. Recent bachelor’s/master’s/PhD candidates are unlikely to be competitive.
• 2+ years managing technical teams in complex, multidisciplinary projects
• 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
• Proficiency in scaling complex data operations across distributed computing resources, using tools such as Spark or Dask
• 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)
• Experience with multispectral remote-sensing data from a variety of sources

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 Exempt

The US base salary range for this full-time exempt position is $200,000 - $250,000

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.