Staff Applied Scientist - Hyperpod

About the company:

In the coming decades, our world needs far more critical minerals including copper, lithium, and cobalt, to build electric infrastructure, vehicles, data centers, and electronics. The mining industry is making 10x fewer discoveries per dollar spent on exploration compared to 30 years ago because the easy-to-find, near surface deposits have largely been discovered.

KoBold is the leading scientific mineral exploration, mine development, and technology development company. Our goal is to turn mineral exploration into a repeatable science to discover the minerals the world needs—by integrating artificial intelligence, human intelligence, and new technology. Our multidisciplinary teams of data scientists, engineers, and geologists work together to build data systems, design new sensors, and establish industry-leading workflows to develop and test subsurface predictions on our exploration projects.

Our first discovery, Mingomba, is a high-grade copper deposit in Zambia, found after spending materially less than industry average. We are developing Mingomba with the same technical rigor that we apply to exploration. The Mingomba team brings together mine and processing engineers, geologists, data scientists, software engineers, and community, health & safety, construction, and operations specialists. By combining industry knowledge and cutting edge technology, we are developing Mingomba into a world class project that has safer and more predictable outcomes for ourselves, partners, and communities. It is expected to create thousands of good jobs for generations.

KoBold runs exploration programs in eight countries, all with the potential for another 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 strategic natural resources companies BHP and Mitsubishi.

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 of this position include:

Technical execution

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.

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

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.

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