Director of 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, and Standard Investments; and natural resources companies Equinor, BHP, and Mitsubishi.

We are hiring a Director of Scientific Computing to help accelerate our mission.

About the position

In this role, you will lead KoBold’s scientific computing team to deliver foundational technology behind our algorithms and machine learning models, and tools that enable KoBold’s talented mineral explorers to collaborate worldwide. Scientific computing at KoBold includes challenges such as serving machine learning models on continent scale satellite data, automated algorithms for optimal design of multibillion dollar capital projects, deep-learning based geophysics emulators, and cloud-hosted, globally available custom 3D scientific and visualization tools. The infrastructure, algorithms, and analysis tools built by you and your team will enable insights that accelerate discovery and development of critical battery metals.

You will join an outstanding team of data scientists and engineers and work closely with KoBold’s world-renowned geoscientists to incorporate our best understanding of the chemical and physical processes that create ore deposits and the optimal path toward responsible and economic extraction. Working with your geoscience colleagues, you will identify and execute on new opportunities and technologies to build and test hypotheses and models of the subsurface.

Ultimately, your role is to help KoBold make valuable discoveries by building and deploying algorithms, pipelines, distributed computing, and collaboration tools at scale to solve scientific problems. 

Responsibilities

The Director of Scientific computing will be responsible for:

Technical execution and leadership

• Develop KoBold’s proprietary exploration tools, building a deep understanding of mineral exploration sufficient to identify and execute on software development opportunities.
• Deeply understand the mineral exploration objectives of the company through dialogue with data science and geoscience leaders as well as how data scientists, geologists, and engineers interact with data.
• Develop and deploy machine learning, statistical, and physics-based techniques to guide our targeting efforts and inform our acquisition and exploration decisions.
• Set the roadmap and vision for the Scientific Computing team, working closely with other KoBold executives.
• Pragmatically make build vs buy decisions to enhance KoBold’s software stack
• Evangelize KoBold’s technology throughout the organization

People management

• Manage a fully remote team of 5-10 software and ML engineers, many of them at the Staff and Principal level
• Understand the professional development objectives of all team members and create opportunities for each person to work on problems that advance their objectives
• Grow the team in collaboration with the VP of Technology and our recruiting team: create a hiring plan, attract talent with a focus on diversity, organize and execute the interview process, onboard new hires
• Ensure engineers fully participate in KoBold’s cross-disciplinary culture
• Present to and collaborate with our external partners and stakeholders.

Qualifications

A great Director of Scientific Computing candidate will have:

• A successful track record of developing and deploying cutting edge machine learning models on scientific data.
• Excellent communication skills for a highly interdisciplinary workplace.
• Significant experience working hands on with messy real world data

Technical skills, including extensive experience with:

• Distributed and high-performance computing
• Great competence in modern python coding practice

Training and work experience:

• An advanced degree in the physical sciences, engineering, computer science, or mathematics.
• Post-degree technical leadership including scientific applications of machine learning

Work practices and motivation:

• 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.
• 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.

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, United Kingdom,, or Canada. All candidates must be authorized to legally work in either the United States or Canada. Occasional travel required.

The US base salary range for this full-time exempt position is $240,000-$300,000.