Frontend Software Engineer

About the company: 

In the coming decades, demand for critical minerals such as copper, lithium, and cobalt will continue to grow. These minerals are needed to build electric infrastructure, vehicles, data centers, and electronics. However, the mining industry is making 10x fewer discoveries per dollar spent on exploration compared to 30 years ago because the easy-to-find, near surface deposits have largely been discovered.

KoBold was founded to be the first AI native mineral exploration, mine development, and technology development company. Our goal is to turn mineral exploration into a repeatable science to discover the minerals the world needs—by integrating artificial intelligence, human intelligence, and new technology. Our multidisciplinary teams of data scientists, engineers, and geologists work together to build data systems, design new sensors, and establish industry-leading workflows to develop and test subsurface predictions on our exploration projects.

Our first discovery, Mingomba, is a high-grade copper deposit in Zambia, found after spending materially less than industry average. We are developing Mingomba with the same technical rigor that we apply to exploration. The Mingomba team brings together mine and processing engineers, geologists, data scientists, software engineers, and community, health & safety, construction, and operations specialists. By combining industry knowledge and cutting edge technology, we are developing Mingomba into a world class project that has safer and more predictable outcomes for ourselves, partners, and communities. It is expected to create thousands of good jobs for generations.

KoBold runs exploration programs in eight countries, all with the potential for another 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 strategic natural resources companies 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.
• A strong communicator who enjoys working with colleagues across the company.

This position is Full-time.

The US base salary range for this full-time exempt position is $160,000 - $240,000.

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

What to Expect

Joining KoBold means getting the opportunity for hands-on exposure to our exploration projects around the world. All employees are expected to travel to project sites, with a minimum of one week per year. Field-facing and technical roles spend significantly more time in the field.

Compensation ranges are listed in USD. If you are based outside the US, the range may not translate directly: US pay reflects a different market with different competitive dynamics, so we benchmark roles against the local market rather than converting the listed figure.