Staff Machine Learning Engineer, KoBold Metals

Remote Sensing

$190-260k

Python
Spark
NumPy
Senior and Expert level
Remote in Canada, US

More information about location

KoBold Metals

AI-powered mineral exploration company

Open for applications

KoBold Metals

AI-powered mineral exploration company

101-200 employees

B2BArtificial IntelligenceSustainabilityBig dataSaaS

Open for applications

$190-260k

Python
Spark
NumPy
Senior and Expert level
Remote in Canada, US

More information about location

101-200 employees

B2BArtificial IntelligenceSustainabilityBig dataSaaS

Company mission

To create value by discovering new ore deposits and expanding existing resources.

Role

Who you are

  • 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 candidates are unlikely to be competitive
  • 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
  • Drive to increase the velocity and effectiveness of our data scientists in both experimental and production workflows
  • 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
  • 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

What the job involves

  • At KoBold we believe that a modern ML stack will enable systematic mineral exploration and materially improve the success rate. This role is a key ingredient to this strategy
  • As a member of our software engineering team, you will apply software engineering and machine learning to large remote-sensing datasets in order to build scalable ML systems to help make high-speed, high-quality decisions for our mineral exploration projects
  • Collaborating with our exceptional team of data scientists and geologists, you will tackle complex scientific problems head-on and collectively pave the way for discoveries of vital energy transition metals like lithium, copper, nickel, and cobalt
  • Together we can shape the future of mineral exploration and contribute to building a sustainable world
  • Architect, implement, and maintain foundational scientific computing libraries for distributed processing of large-scale geospatial rasters, to be used in Kobold’s mineral exploration analyses
  • In collaboration with other engineers, build tooling to increase the velocity of our machine learning progress on geospatial raster data, including enabling rapid prototyping in Jupyter notebooks; build experimentation, evaluation, and simulation frameworks; turning successful R&D into robust, scalable ML pipelines; and organizing models and their outputs for repeatability and discoverability
  • In collaboration with data scientists, build models to make statistically valid predictions about the locations of compositional anomalies within the Earth’s crust
  • Apply–and coach team members to use–engineering best practices such as writing robust, testable and composable code
  • Collaborate with data scientists, geoscientists and engineers to invent the modern scientific computing stack for mineral exploration

Our take

Supported by billionaires Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson, KoBold Metals utilises AI and Cloud computing techniques to assess the composition of the subsurface in order to explore metals that are used in making batteries installed in electric vehicles and clean energy technologies.

KoBold is a force in its field with significant financial backing, not just from the aforementioned tycoons, but thanks to Andreessen Horowitz, one of Silicon Valley’s leading venture capital funds. In 2019, this enabled KoBold to have funding available for four years, which, since then, has financed explorations at various locations, including Greenland.

As the climate crisis intensifies, the world has increasingly moved towards sustainability and hence demand for sustainable products like EVs has gone up, increasing the need for KoBold’s mineral exploration services. Forecasts for increased demand will likely lead to more investment in KoBold to ensure further explorations in different areas.

Steph headshot

Steph

Company Specialist

Insights

Top investors

Few candidates hear
back within 2 weeks

50% employee growth in 12 months

Company

Funding (last 2 of 3 rounds)

Jun 2023

$195m

SERIES B

Feb 2022

$192.5m

SERIES B

Total funding: $407.5m

Company benefits

  • Incentive stock options 🇺🇸
  • Group health insurance 🇺🇸
  • Company sponsored 401(k) plan with company match 🇺🇸
  • Paid time off 🇺🇸
  • Remote work 🇺🇸
  • Paid parental leave 🇺🇸
  • Communications reimbursement for expenses such as internet and cell phone 🇺🇸
  • Every full-time US employee is subject to a yearly performance review and eligible for a performance-based compensation increase 🇺🇸

Company values

  • Perform
  • Learn
  • Improve constantly
  • Enthusiasm for finding the minerals of the future

Company HQ

Downtown Berkeley, Berkeley, CA

Leadership

Previously served as COO for Phase Change Resources. Experience as Vice President of Development for BG Group and as Chief Reservoir Engineer for ConocoPhillips, also serving here as Manager of Abu Dhabi Technology Center and Manager of Unconventional Gas Technology.

Josh Goldman

(President)

Previously served as Senior Vice President of Corporate Development of Phase Change Resources and as an Engagement Manager of McKinsey & Company.

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