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. Since founding in 2018, 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 80 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, Durable Capital, StepStone, and Standard Investments; and natural resources companies Equinor, BHP, and Mitsubishi.
About the Role
Senior individual contributor reporting to the Head of Operations Data, coordinating day to day with the broader team and functional stakeholders. Owns systems end to end — data model, ETL, application, and stakeholder relationships — with minimal oversight from day one, and mentors junior analysts. Approximate initial allocation:
Responsibilities
- 45% Build & integration — new data models, ETL/API integrations, and app support (Foundry et al.)
- 25% Platform maintenance & data quality — OPSDB stewardship, sync reliability, alerting, production support
- 15% Governance & technical debt — RBAC, scoped roles, dbt semantic layer, documentation
- 15% Mingomba support & cross-functional mentorship — commitments register, peer mentorship and skill growth, coordination with Mingomba functional growth like Procurement, Inventory
Qualifications
- 5+ years in data engineering, analytics engineering, or data operations owning production systems independently
- Strong SQL and data modeling (PostgreSQL)
- Proven ETL and API integration
- Experience and comfort with AI (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, etc.)
- Dbt, cloud tooling (AWS/S3), finance-systems (NetSuite/Tipalti), or geospatial data a plus.
- Intellectual curiosity and eagerness to learn about all aspects of mineral exploration, particularly in the geology domain. Enjoys constantly learning such that you are driving insights through using our tools in exploration and willing to work directly with geologists in the field.
- Ability to explain technical problems to and collaborate on solutions with domain experts who are not technical. 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 an evolving 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.
- A valid passport and willingness to travel to observe our work at Mingomba or at an exploration site around the world. Light travel is required when necessary.
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, disability, or veteran status.
This position is Full-time Exempt
The US base salary range for this full-time exempt position is $100,000 to $125,000 plus equity and benefits including 401k matching.
Location: KoBold is a remote-first workplace. All candidates must be legally authorized to work in one of the following countries: United States or Canada.
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