Infrastructure Engineer

 

 About the Company

KoBold Metals is a rapidly growing Silicon Valley start-up using AI to enable the transition to electrification and help solve climate change. We are backed by Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a16z, Bond Capital, Sam Altman, T Rowe Price, and other premier VCs.

Our team includes the best of the industry in exploration geoscience, data science, software engineering, and business personnel. KoBold’s world-renowned geoscientists have made nearly 20 discoveries. They work on joint teams with outstanding data scientists, who have PhDs in physics, math, materials science, and geophysics. And our technology backbone has been built from scratch by our team of software engineers who are alumni of top Silicon Valley tech companies.

KoBold is privately held and our investors include: institutional asset managers T. Rowe Rice and Canada Pension Plan Investments; technology venture capitalists Andreessen Horowitz, Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures, BOND Capital, Standard Investments, and Sam Altman’s Apollo Projects; and leading natural resources companies Equinor, Mitsubishi, and BHP.

We are hiring an Infrastructure Engineer to help accelerate our mission. 

About the position

In this role, you will architect and deploy software to accelerate discovery of battery metals and to help construct the global geoscience data system that underlies our digital exploration program. You will join an outstanding team of data scientists and engineers and will work closely with KoBold’s world-renowned geoscientists. You will be responsible for helping us build reliable and secure infrastructure while contributing broadly across our technology stack. Ultimately, your role is to help build data tools to solve challenging scientific problems and to enable the widespread adoption of electric vehicles. As one of the early members of this team, you will help build these tools from the ground up.

Responsibilities

The Infrastructure Engineer will:

• Help develop KoBold’s proprietary data system, TerraShed®, and modeling software, Machine Prospector®
• 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

 

Qualifications

A great Infrastructure Engineer candidate will have:

• Expertise in at least one programming language (KoBold’s primary language is Python, but a candidate with expertise in, e.g., Go or Ruby will still be competitive)
• Experience 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
• Experience with Kubernetes
• Experience designing, deploying, and managing monitoring and alerting systems against well-defined service metrics (e.g. SLO, SLA)
• 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

 

A great Infrastructure Engineer candidate will also be:

• 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
• Excited to work on a wide range of problems, and to take on a wide range of responsibilities, learning new tech tools whenever needed
• Highly intellectually curious and eager to learn from technical experts who aren’t solely software engineers
• Keen not just to build products, but to figure out what product to build to best achieve the business objectives of the company
• Highly self-motivated and autonomous, able to effectively structure one’s own work, make realistic time estimates, and communicate well as one progresses
• 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
• A clear technical writer, reflecting a deep understanding of what guidance users/colleagues need to effectively and efficiently use the systems you build
• Careful to get the details right

It is helpful but not required to have:

• Experience with geospatial databases, analyses, and/or visualizations
• Expertise in designing and deploying container-based software in Kubernetes
• A bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in the physical sciences, engineering, computer science, or mathematics

 

Level: This is an individual contributor role. This position requires a minimum of 2-3 years of relevant full-time professional work experience; recent bachelor’s/master’s candidates are unlikely to be competitive.

 

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, marital status, disability, or veteran status.

This position is full-time, exempt.

Location: KoBold® is a remote first workplace, we are open to candidates currently residing anywhere in the United States or Canada. All candidates must be authorized to legally work in either the United States for Canada

The US base salary range for this full-time exempt position is $110,000-$170,000.