Software Engineer, Data Platform

About the Company

KoBold Metals is a rapidly growing Silicon Valley start-up using AI to enable the transition to electrification and help solve climate change. We are backed by Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a16z, Bond Capital, Sam Altman, T Rowe Price, and other premier VCs.

Our team includes the best of the industry in exploration geoscience, data science, software engineering, and business personnel. KoBold’s world-renowned geoscientists have made nearly 20 discoveries. They work on joint teams with outstanding data scientists, who have PhDs in physics, math, materials science, and geophysics. And our technology backbone has been built from scratch by our team of software engineers who are alumni of top Silicon Valley tech companies.

About The Role:

One of KoBold’s core beliefs is that making mineral exploration data broadly accessible to humans (geologists and data scientists) and machines (machine learning pipelines) will improve our chances to discover the metals such as lithium, copper, nickel and cobalt that are critical for the energy transition. This role in the software engineering team will help realize this vision by building the system that stores and serves all geoscientific data at Kobold. You will build this system to organize large-scale mineral exploration information and make it accessible and useful. You will collaborate with our outstanding team of data scientists and geologists to build the system features needed to solve challenging scientific problems together.

Responsibilities

The Software Engineer, Data Platform will:

• Contribute to building KoBold’s data system, TerraShed™. This will encompass understanding user needs (together with our product manager), prototyping, design, implementation, testing, writing documentation, and helping our users use the data system.

• Deliver new features to improve the user experience with data, for example to make it easy to quickly add data from a variety of sources such as data collected in the field or generated by machine learning pipelines

• Improve data discoverability with features such as data lineage and search improvements

• Improve data coverage by extending the types and formats of data the data system can manage

• Optimize the scalability, robustness and performance of the data system

• Foster the data system’s interoperability with the rest of the technology stack used at Kobold, including machine learning pipelines, geospatial visualization systems such as QGIS, and third-party geoscience software.

Qualifications

• A bachelor’s degree or higher in computer science, engineering, mathematics, or the physical sciences, or equivalent work experience

• 2 years of software engineering experience, writing code in a production environment

• Ability to write production-quality code that is correct, readable, well-tested, scalable and extensible

• Proficiency in Python

• Experience with a Cloud-based stack such as AWS, Github, Docker, CI/CD, Kubernetes, Postgres or other databases, Datadog or other telemetry systems, Jenkins, … 

• Familiarity with large-scale system design 

• Optionally: Experience with front-end development

A great candidate will also be:

• Excited to work on a wide range of problems, in a dynamic work environment, and to take on a wide range of responsibilities, learning new tech tools and scientific knowledge whenever needed

• Highly intellectually curious and eager to learn about all aspects of mineral exploration from technical experts who aren’t software engineers

• 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

• Self-motivated and autonomous, able to effectively structure one’s own work and communicate as one progresses

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, disability, or veteran status.

This position is full-time, exempt.

Location: Remote, Candidates can be located anywhere in the United States or Canada. 

The US base salary range for this full-time exempt position is $125,000-$170,000.