Data Scientist - Staff or Senior (Australia)

About the role

KoBold Metals is a mineral exploration company using AI to explore for the metals we need for our transition to a low-carbon economy. KoBold’s business is discovering, defining, expanding, and developing mineral resources, and KoBold’s objective is to achieve a step-change improvement in exploration success: we aim to discover more tier 1 resources, faster, and with fewer failures.

KoBold has a global portfolio of more than 50 exploration properties targeting nickel, copper, cobalt, and lithium, which range from 100%-owned to partnerships with both majors, junior explorers, and prospectors.

The Data Scientist will help accelerate KoBold’s mission by building predictive models and applying a wide range of scientific computing, statistical, and physics-based methods to find places where there is evidence of ore-forming processes at work and to predict the locations of ore-grade mineralization in 2D and 3D. They will help build a worldwide dataset that underlies our exploration program, with careful attention to identifying and quantifying uncertainty in the data and in their predictions. They will create models and develop software to accelerate discovery of critical battery metals.

Qualifications

• A great Data Scientist candidate will have:
• Extensive experience with Python’s data science packages and general software engineering practices.
• Collaborative software development (git), and familiarity with software engineering best practices like unit test / integration test suites, and CICD pipelines.
• Cloud computing resources.
• Building predictive models, applying them to different problems, and evaluating and interpreting the results.
• Data from a variety of physical systems.
• Broad skills in and knowledge of applied statistics and Bayesian inference
• Substantial understanding of machine learning algorithms
• An advanced degree in the physical sciences, engineering, computer science, or mathematics.
• A minimum work experience of 4 years post PhD or 8 years post MS, ideally as a data scientist or data engineer.
• Experience leading technical teams to apply novel scientific approaches to core business problems

Work practices and motivation

• Ability to take ownership and responsibility of large projects.
• Ability to explain technical problems to and collaborate on solutions with domain experts.
• Communicates well on a collaborative, cross-functional team.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.