Project Controls Manager

About the Company

KoBold Metals Zambia is a Zambian-led company exploring for the ore deposits that will become the next generation of new mines in Zambia.

KoBold Metals Zambia is the Zambian affiliate of KoBold Metals, a U.S.-based company exploring around the world for battery metals using proprietary AI to guide exploration decisions. Our business is discovering, defining, expanding, and developing mineral resources, and our objective is to achieve a step-change improvement in exploration success resulting in more tier 1 resources discovered faster, with fewer failures, and with far less exploration capital.

KoBold is privately held and its investors include: institutional asset managers T. Rowe Rice and Canada Pension Plan Investments; technology venture capitalists Andreessen Horowitz, Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures, BOND Capital, Standard Investments, and Sam Altman’s Apollo Projects; and leading natural resources companies Equinor, Mitsubishi, and BHP.

KoBold Metals Zambia is building a rapidly growing team of Zambian geologists, operators, and executives to identify, acquire, explore, and develop exploration opportunities and mineral resources drawing upon KoBold’s technology and the expertise of colleagues worldwide.

About the Position:

The Project Controls Manager will lead the following:

• Manage overarching project schedule and budget for building Mingomba Mine

• Develop and manage the project controls team, with ultimate responsibility for:

  • Planning and scheduling

  • Cost estimation

  • Progress monitoring measurement

  • Uncertainty and risk management

  • Reporting

• Work to ensure the overall project is effectively staffed at all stages of its development.

• Define, model, and communicate various critical path scenarios.

• Define and implement the framework under which cost and schedule estimates are generated; ensuring that estimation work is done with all required context, appropriate and consistent methodologies, and at suitable levels of certainty for the project stage. 

• Define and manage the process for design, scope, cost, and schedule changes; while creating processes to ensure early identification of changes and mitigation options.

• Define project governance, both within the project team, and working with KoBold executives to define how the project will be managed within the overall corporate structure (e.g., defining stage-gates, approvals processes, quality controls and peer review processes).

• Establish the framework to catalog and track key project uncertainties and risks, mitigation plans to address these uncertainties and risks, and to what degree each of the uncertainties should be reduced and/or risks should be mitigated at each project stage.

• Define and implement project monitoring and reporting practices, with an emphasis on (1) quantitative and concise communications, and (2) facilitating real-time or near-real time monitoring of project performance (e.g., dashboards, in addition to static monthly reports).

• Contractor Governance and Management oversight

An excellent candidate for this position should exhibit the following:

• Willingness to build up a new project controls framework, leveraging one's own experience, best practices, and peer review (including consultants where warranted)

• Excellent analytical skills with ability to quantitatively assess uncertainty and risk

• Attention to detail and ability ensure the teams’ work is done to high degree of accuracy

• Ability to work in a fast-paced, at times stressful environment

• Agility in changing project conditions and ability to drive adaptation project direction

• Willingness to think from first principles (i.e., use bottom up calculations, not heuristics)

• Ensure that the project is developed to KoBold high ethical standards, including in upholding our standards for a safe, environmentally responsible, and community sensitive mine construction (and operations) project.

• Demonstrate leadership in skills development and transfer to local team

Candidates are required to have the following:

• Excellent communications skills in English, both verbal and written

• Bachelor’s degree or higher in engineering, construction management, project management or business

• Project Management Professional & registration with relevant national bodies

• At least 10 years of experience, including at least 5 in a project controls leadership role

• Solid experience leading and managing large projects - mining, construction, industrial, energy, manufacturing-related

• Experience with enterprise resource planning, estimating, and related softwares (e.g. Primavera)

• Exceptional understanding of accounting functions and systems

We are committed to equal employment opportunities for all people.

Location: Northern Copperbelt, Zambia

This position is a full-time contract role. 

At this time we are only accepting applications from Zambian nationals.

Location: Lusaka, Zambia