Applied Scientist

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

In this role, you will develop state of the art instruments to collect data to guide our exploration programs. You will simulate, characterize, and calibrate sensor performance and design new data acquisition systems. Working with vendors and partners, you will build hardware and work with our operations staff to deploy it in the field.

With this sensor data and other data sources at KoBold, you will build models and apply a wide range of scientific computing, statistical, and physics-based methods to find places where there is evidence of ore-forming processes at work and to predict the locations of ore-grade mineralization in 2D and 3D. You will help build a worldwide dataset that underlies our exploration program, with careful attention to identifying and quantifying uncertainty in the data and in our predictions. You will be creating models and developing software to accelerate discovery of critical battery metals.

You will join an outstanding team of data scientists and engineers and will work closely with KoBold’s world-renowned geoscientists to incorporate our best understanding of the chemical and physical processes that create ore deposits. Working with your geoscience colleagues, you will identify new opportunities and technologies for geophysical data collection, create 2D and 3D geologic predictions, identify exploration targets, design field programs to collect data, and use that data to reduce the uncertainty in our predictions and guide the next phase of field work.

Ultimately, your role is to help KoBold make valuable discoveries by building and deploying next generation hardware and using data tools to solve scientific problems. As one of the early members of this team, you will help build these tools from the ground up.

Responsibilities

The Scientist will:

• Design, develop, and deploy new mineral exploration data collection instruments and methods.
• Help develop KoBold’s proprietary software exploration tools.
• Find and curate a wide variety of geospectral, geophysical, geochemical, geologic, and geographic data and integrate it into KoBold’s proprietary data system.
• Build models to make statistically valid predictions about the locations of compositional anomalies within the Earth’s crust.
• Create effective visualizations for evaluating model performance and enabling rapid interaction with the underlying data and key features.
• Develop and apply a range of data processing, statistical, and physics-based techniques to geoscientific data — from computer vision to geophysical inversions — and use the results to guide our targeting efforts and inform our acquisition and exploration decisions.
• Present to and collaborate with our external partners and stakeholders.

Qualifications

A great Scientist candidate will have:

• A successful track record of developing complex equipment with cross-disciplinary teams and vendors.

Technical skills, including extensive experience with:

• Physical measurement and data analysis systems that use phenomena such as optics, electromagnetism, radiation, and gravity.
• Applying scientific knowledge to identify and prototype emerging technologies
• Systems integration and data acquisition.
• Python’s data science packages and general software engineering practices.
• Collaborative software development (git), and familiarity with software engineering best practices like unit test / integration test suites, and CICD pipelines.
• SQL, as well as familiarity with non-relational databases.
• Cloud computing resources.
• Building a wide variety of predictive models, applying them to different problems, and evaluating and interpreting the results.
• Working with a broad range of types of data including data from physical systems.
• Geospatial analyses and visualizations.

Technical knowledge:

• Broad skills in and knowledge of data analysis, physics, and applied statistics

Training and work experience:

• An advanced degree in the physical sciences, engineering, computer science, or mathematics.
• Post-degree work experience as a scientist or engineer.

Work practices and motivation:

• Ability to take ownership and responsibility of large projects.
• 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.
• Excitement about joining a fast-growing early-stage company, comfort with a dynamic work environment, and eagerness to take on a range of responsibilities.
• Ability to independently prioritize multiple tasks effectively.

It is also helpful but not required to have experience with:

• Remote sensing
• Creating machine learning models on geospatial data
• Image processing or computer vision
• Project and team management

KoBold Metals is an equal opportunity workplace and an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunities 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.

Location: KoBold is a remote first workplace, we are open to candidates currently residing anywhere in the United States or Canada. All candidates must be authorized to legally work in either the United States for Canada.

Salary for this position: $85,000 - $115,000