Infrastructure and Security, Engineering Manager

Infrastructure and Security, Engineering 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 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 an Infrastructure and Security Engineering Manager to accelerate our mission.

About The Role:

One of KoBold’s core beliefs is that discovering the metals —such as lithium, copper, nickel, and cobalt–  critical to enabling the energy transition will require deep collaboration between humans (geologists and data scientists) and machines (software, algorithms, and machine learning pipelines). This Infrastructure and Security Senior Manager role will help realize this vision by leading the team at the foundation of that collaboration - supporting and securing the computational systems at KoBold.

In this role, you will be responsible for not only building and maintaining systems that enable KoBold to be a successful global exploration company - including underlying AWS infrastructure, IT and commercial software packages, and cybersecurity. You will ensure that our computation operates securely, efficiently, and reliably and empower collaboration between geologists, data scientists, and engineers around the planet.

Reporting to the VP of Technology, the responsibilities of this position include:

Technical execution and leadership

• Deeply understand the uses of KoBold’s cloud technology to enable sound decision-making about infrastructure
• Build highly effective interdisciplinary relationships with scientists and engineers across the KoBold organization so that infrastructure engineering is well integrated and effectively tailored to the computational needs of the business
• Lead the team implementing and maintaining scalable, secure cloud-based systems for geoscientific data and distributed computing.
• Oversee the IT team, including hardware, network configuration, and commercial software licenses. 
• Build on KoBold’s already strong cybersecurity posture. 
• Lead the week-to-week working cadence and quarterly planning process, set clear goals and timelines, and align our execution/tracking frameworks with our plans

Contribute Directly to Infrastructure Engineering

• Design and implement infrastructure for distributed parallel ML and scientific computing
• Design, implement, and maintain security protocols for highly proprietary data
• Design components of the data system to ingest, store, process, and access a large volume and wide variety of geoscience data for both predictive modeling and visualization

People Management

• Manage a team of 5–10 engineers of varying seniority, fostering a culture of collaboration, inclusion, and accountability.
• Provide actionable feedback and support the professional growth of each team member.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in software engineering, with hands-on cloud infrastructure management and cybersecurity focus.
• 2+ years of leadership experience, managing technical teams in a multidisciplinary environment.
• Expertise in Python and designing and deploying systems in the cloud on AWS, GCP, or Azure and defining those systems with infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform or CloudFormation.
• Proven ability to implement secure, scalable systems for data management, access, and compute.
• Experience with Kubernetes and GitOps-style deployments via ArgoCD or similar
• Experience designing, deploying, and managing monitoring and alerting systems against well-defined service metrics (e.g. SLO, SLA), especially via Datadog or similar
• Experience building systems to develop, deploy, and instrument machine learning models, particularly in Kubeflow or similar frameworks
• Prior responsibility for planning and implementing information security measures
• Strong track record of working effectively with diverse stakeholders: multidisciplinary environment, diverse personalities and backgrounds 
• Deeply understand the uses of KoBold’s cloud technology to enable sound decision-making about infrastructure
• Build highly effective interdisciplinary relationships with scientists and engineers across the KoBold organization so that infrastructure engineering is well integrated and effectively tailored to the computational needs of the business
• Demonstrated ability to quickly absorb and synthesize complex information, with a track record of high intellectual rigor in a professional setting.
• Exceptional curiosity and eagerness to learn, with a proactive approach to exploring new concepts and technologies.

Our ideal candidate will also be:

• Able to balance strategic vision with tactical execution, particularly in high-stakes IT and cybersecurity contexts.
• Motivated to build and maintain systems that meet challenging infrastructure requirements and to work closely with engineering colleagues on a broad set of infrastructure problems
• Focused on making decisions about risk based on practical considerations and a deep understanding of the company’s business, rather than on compliance checklists or blind adherence to a preferred set of practices
• Skilled at supporting non-engineering staff such as geologists, legal and business personnel, communicating complex technical and security concepts to non-specialists
• Versatile, resourceful, and comfortable with a fast-changing and multidisciplinary work environment
• Intuitive and empathetic, able to read people effectively and understand what’s important to them, and able to attract great talent and to build long-term relationships
• Have experience scaling infrastructure at a growing startup

KoBold Metals is an equal opportunity workplace and an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity for people of any race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, marital status, national origin, age, citizenship, disability, or veteran status.

This position is Full-time Exempt

The US base salary range for this full-time exempt position is $190,000 -  $230,000. 

Location: Remote, Candidates can be located anywhere in the United States, United Kingdom, or Canada. All candidates must be legally authorized to work in the United States, United Kingdom, or Canada.