GIS Data Specialist
About the company
KoBold Metals is a mineral exploration company that uses machine learning and other scientific computing techniques to increase the ethical supply of critical materials (i.e., Ni, Co, Cu, Li) needed to build electric vehicles and renewable energy storage. Many new mines will be needed if electric vehicles are to become widespread, but before new ore deposits can be mined, they must be found.
KoBold is the first full-stack exploration company. We combine the world's top mineral explorers with an outstanding team of data scientists and software engineers to bring a comprehensive skill set to bear on exploration. Our technology has been built from scratch by alumni of top Silicon Valley software companies to guide every aspect of mineral exploration as well as mine development and operations. Our team consists of dozens of PhDs in physics, math, materials science, and geophysics, as well as top mineral explorers who collectively have >300 years of exploration experience and have made nearly 20 discoveries.
Our data platform, TerraShedTM, aggregates and structures vast collections of scientific data. And Machine Prospector®, our suite of algorithms, interrogates that data with a range of techniques-from computer vision, to full-physics joint inversions, to ensemble machine learning-to make statistically rigorous predictions of the composition of the subsurface.
The careful use of statistics is an essential component of exploration and mine development given the data's inherent uncertainty, and Machine Prospector® rigorously quantifies how new data will decrease prediction uncertainty. These predictive models are used to guide our decisions of where to acquire land, what field data to collect, and where to drill to discover new ore deposits.
KoBold Metals is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Equinor.
About the position
KoBold is looking for a highly motivated GIS Data Specialist to be part of our multidisciplinary exploration team. In this role you will be responsible for curating geoscientific datasets and using them to build well-organized and styled GIS projects to support our exploration and scientific discovery efforts. You will strive for the highest standard of quality in obtaining and curating new datasets for TerraShedTM so that they are readily available to the rest of the KoBold team. You will work on the cutting edge of geospatial technology, taking it upon yourself to master software features and help our entire team level up. And you will do all of this in a startup with a rapidly-growing technological platform, working closely with our team of geoscientists, data scientists, and software engineers.
Responsibilities
The GIS Data Specialist will:
- Aggregate, QA, organize, and style spatial data from diverse sources
- Design and maintain cloud-based, high-quality, performant GIS projects shared across multiple members of the exploration team
- Discover and ingest a wide variety of geologic, geophysical, geochemical, and geographic data with appropriate metadata into KoBold's proprietary database TerraShedTM
- Georeference and digitize maps and other images, and build training datasets for machine learning models
- Solve spatial and GIS application data challenges, such as coordinate system registrations and transforming file types
- Independently analyze, troubleshoot, research, and resolve GIS application problems
- Provide technical QGIS assistance to colleagues, internal training, and data policy guidance
Qualifications
A great GIS Data Specialist candidate will have:
Technical knowledge and skills:
- Strong proficiency with QGIS and/or ArcGIS
- Strong knowledge of geospatial coordinate reference systems
- Familiarity with geospatial data types, including open-source and proprietary vector and raster data formats
Training and work experience:
- A bachelor's degree or substantial coursework in geology or a related discipline
- At least 2 years work experience using QGIS and ESRI GIS suite, with a preference for experience working with geological, geochemical, and geophysical data in the mining industry
Work practices and motivation:
- Excellent attention to detail, organization skills, and listening skills
- Enthusiasm for cataloging and curating data
- Eagerness to learn and to use new technologies
- Ability to prioritize multiple tasks effectively
- Extreme discomfort toward bad or inconsistent data
It is helpful but not required to have experience with:
- SQL databases
- Cloud storage
- Work in a software-engineering environment
- Python, or another programming language
- Leapfrog, GOCAD, or other 3D visualization package
This position is full-time, exempt.
Location: Remote from any location in the US or Canada.
Interested applicants should send a resume to jobs@koboldmetals.com.
