Frontend Software Engineer

About the company:

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.

Responsibilities:

• Build intuitive and elegant user experiences to empower fellow KoBolders with backgrounds in geology, geophysics, geochemistry, and data science.
• Own and improve KoBold’s existing web apps that manage data upload, discovery, search, and visualization.
• Collaborate with scientists to architect new tools to support complex, interactive 2D/3D geospatial visualizations, plotting, and data labeling.
• Champion frontend best practices. Modernize our stack to standardize our UIs, prototype faster, and deploy useful apps for our geologists and data scientists. Mentor junior developers.
• Setup systems to automate the testing of our UIs.

Qualifications:

• Experience in architecting, developing, and maintaining frontend applications that provide a rich user experience.
• Experience in writing production-quality code that is correct, performant, scalable, and extensible.
• Skilled with data visualization libraries (D3, Leaflet, etc).
• Experience with the following: modern JavaScript tools (node.js, TypeScript, React, Angular, etc), modern deployment and cloud technologies, Python web frameworks (Django, Panel, Flask, etc), and classic frontend development (HTML, CSS, etc).

Bonus Qualifications:

• Experience with geospatial data and building map-based experiences.
• Familiarity with containerization and container orchestration platforms, such as Docker, AWS ECS, Kubernetes, etc.
• Experience with frontend automated-testing systems (Cypress, Selenium, etc).

A great candidate will also be:

• Highly intellectually curious and eager to learn about all aspects of mineral exploration, particularly in the geology domain. Will be open to working directly with geologists in the field.
• Excited to work on a wide range of problems in a dynamic work environment, to take on a wide range of responsibilities, and to learn new tech and science.
• 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.