Product Manager

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 Price and Canada Pension Plan Investments; technology venture capitalists Andreessen Horowitz, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, BOND Capital, Durable Capital, StepStone, and Standard Investments; and natural resources companies Equinor, BHP, and Mitsubishi.

About the position

A successful Product Manager at KoBold is relentlessly focused on discovering world-class mineral deposits. You will work closely with your engineering, geology, and data science colleagues to put a wide range of data types from a wide range of sources in the hands of scientists, and give them the tools to do cutting edge analysis on it. The result will be better daily decisions to best direct our exploration efforts: where to do surveys, collect samples, and drill. Your work will pave the way for a more abundant and sustainable supply of critical metals like nickel, lithium, and copper.

Responsibilities

• Decide what we’re going to build and why by developing conviction and getting everyone on board
• Learning the ins and outs of developing geological hypotheses and models by collaborating with geologists and data scientists on KoBold’s active exploration projects
• Joining field programs to experience the impact of technology—and to discover new possibilities—on how we gather new sources of information
• Developing strong beliefs about the how the next generation of deposits will be discovered and technology’s role in it
• Finding the gaps and bottlenecks in the team’s current practices and translating that into tangible technology goals
• Actively assess the ongoing exploration impact of our software through constant communication with teams as well as defining product metrics
• Produce mocks, prototypes, and wireframes to communicate your product vision
• Synthesizing your vision into documents and presentations for leadership, engineers, and other explorers
• Clearly stating the functional hypotheses that motivate our work, and prioritizing work to falsify them when they are uncertain.
• Strive to bring people together, rather than serve as an intermediary. At KoBold, we don’t have customers—we have colleagues—and PMs serve a uniquely interdisciplinary role in bringing colleagues together across disciplines.