Data Operations Engineer

Data Operations Engineer 

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 making mineral exploration data broadly accessible to humans and machines will enable systematic exploration and materially improved success rates. This role will help realize this vision by combining software, systems and data engineering to solve the scalability challenges associated with an ever increasing volume of heterogeneous mineral exploration data.

Responsibilities of this role include:

• Collect, standardize, clean, and organize heterogeneous mineral exploration data. This data comes from a variety of sources (government, third parties, collected in our own operations), includes multiple different types (unstructured text, images, tabular data, …), and comes in a variety of formats and cleanliness. This role will handle the idiosyncrasies of each data set.
• Build tooling to support our field operations such as dashboards, visualizations, data processing pipelines, integrations with third party software.
• Build scalable, reliable, and performant systems to support the above operations, in collaboration with the engineering team
• Eliminate work through automation and efficiency improvements
• Optimize existing systems and processes to increase scale and velocity of our data processing
• Evangelize automation and engineering best practices throughout Kobold. Mentor other team members to adopt them
• Work with data scientists and geoscientists to generate data that meet their data quality and accessibility requirements

Qualifications

Our ideal candidate will have:

• At least 5 years of experience in a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), DevOps or Software Engineering role, ideally working on a data product
• Proficiency in large-scale system design 
• Proficiency in Python, including data processing libraries such as pandas and distributed computing frameworks such as Dask
• Proficiency in performance optimization for data storage and serving
• Discerning ability, curiosity and initiative to identify inefficiencies and opportunities for automation. Creativity and follow-through to address these problems in a systematic way
• Track record of scaling a fast-growing product, in a startup or as a member of a small team
• Collaborative attitude to work with stakeholders with different backgrounds (data scientists, geoscientists, software engineers, operations)

It is helpful but not required to have:

• Experience working with scientific or geospatial datasets

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.

This position is full-time, exempt.

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.