Data Scientist, Hyperspectral Remote Sensing

Data Scientist, Hyperspectral Remote Sensing

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. In the six years since founding, 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 60 other projects, each of which has the potential for another high-quality discovery.

KoBold is privately held; investors include institutional asset managers T. Rowe Rice and Canada Pension Plan Investments; technology venture capitalists Andreessen Horowitz, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, BOND Capital, and Standard Investments; and natural resources companies Equinor, BHP, and Mitsubishi.

We are hiring a Data Scientist to help accelerate our mission.

About the position

In this role, you will build predictive models and apply a wide range of scientific computing, statistical, and physics-based methods to transform remote sensing data, including multi- and hyper-spectral, into actionable insights that guide our exploration programs. You will further develop KoBold’s in-house remote sensing instrumentation and develop modeling tools to optimize further data collection efforts. You will be creating insights that accelerate discovery of critical battery metals.

You will join an outstanding team of data scientists and engineers and will work closely with KoBold’s world-renowned geoscientists to incorporate our best understanding of the chemical and physical processes that create ore deposits. Working with your geoscience colleagues, you will identify new opportunities and technologies for geophysical data collection, create predictions, identify exploration targets, design field programs to collect data, and use that data to reduce the uncertainty in our predictions and guide the next phase of field work.

Ultimately, your role is to help KoBold make valuable discoveries by building and deploying next generation hardware and analysis techniques to solve scientific problems. 

Responsibilities

The Hyperspectral Data Scientist will:

• Apply state-of-the-art analysis techniques to multi- and hyper-spectral remote sensing data
• Model and simulate remote sensing instruments to improve data collection and guide development of future instruments
• Help develop KoBold’s proprietary software exploration tools.
• Find and curate open source remote sensing data and integrate it into KoBold’s proprietary data system.
• Build models to make statistically valid predictions about the locations of compositional anomalies within the Earth’s crust.
• Create effective visualizations for evaluating model performance and enabling rapid interaction with the underlying data and key features.
• Develop and apply a range of data processing, statistical, and physics-based techniques to geoscientific data, including both reflectance and emissivity spectroscopy, and use the results to guide our targeting efforts and inform our acquisition and exploration decisions.
• Present to and collaborate with our external partners and stakeholders.

Qualifications

A great Hyperspectral Scientist candidate will have:

• A successful track record of working with remote sensing instrumentation, especially reflectance and emissivity spectroscopy, and developing and deploying state-of-the-art spectral analysis techniques.

Technical skills, including extensive experience with:

• Physical measurement and data analysis systems. 
• Applying scientific knowledge to identify and prototype emerging technologies
• Systems integration and data acquisition.
• Python’s data science packages and general software engineering practices.
• Collabor