Director of Scientific Computing, KoBold Metals
$240-300k
More information about location
AI-powered mineral exploration company
Open for applications
AI-powered mineral exploration company
201-500 employees
Open for applications
$240-300k
More information about location
201-500 employees
Company mission
To create value by discovering new ore deposits and expanding existing resources.
Role
Who you are
- 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
What the job involves
- 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
- 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
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. With recent approval for backing a new copper mine in Zambia, along with additional funding, the growing demand for sustainable resources positions KoBold for a promising future.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Funding (last 2 of 4 rounds)
Jan 2025
$527m
SERIES C
Jun 2023
$195m
SERIES B
Total funding: $934.5m
Company HQ
Downtown Berkeley, Berkeley, CA
Leadership
Kurt House
(Co-Founder & CEO)Previously founded a carbon Sequestration and enhanced oil recovery venture as well as a natural gas asset acquisition platform. They also worked in Private Equity and Corporate Consulting at Bain & Company and spent time as an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University.
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