Staff Mining Engineer

About Mariana Minerals

Mariana Minerals is a software-first, vertically integrated minerals company on a mission to supply the critical minerals powering modern energy, AI, and defense technologies. We’re reimagining the minerals supply chain by combining deep industry expertise with advanced software, automation, and data-driven decision-making.

About the Role

Mariana Minerals is seeking a Staff Mining Engineer with 10+ years of mining experience and a strong background in hands-on, hard-rock open pit operations. This role connects mine planning with field execution, ensuring that designs and production schedules translate into safe, practical, and efficient mining activities.

You will lead short- and medium-term mine planning, support daily production execution, and improve mining performance. The ideal candidate understands how a mine actually operates: equipment capabilities, achievable productivities, operational delays, and the constraints that determine whether a plan can be delivered.

What You'll Do

• Lead safety and uphold standards.
• Demonstrate visible safety leadership in the field. Incorporate operational risks, geotechnical requirements, and applicable standards into mine designs, schedules, and execution practices.
• Develop mine plans and schedules.
• Prepare and maintain shift, daily, weekly, monthly, and rolling medium-term plans aligned with longer-term mine objectives, production targets, and available resources.
• Turn plans into executable operations.
• Translate designs and schedules into clear work instructions, priorities, and field deliverables. Confirm access, working areas, equipment, blast readiness, and material destinations with operations teams.
• Design practical mining layouts.
• Develop and update pit, bench, ramp, haul-road, stockpile, and waste-dump designs that meet safety requirements and support efficient equipment movement and mining sequences.
• Plan ore and waste movement.
• Coordinate ore extraction, waste stripping, stockpiling, and material routing. Work with geology and processing teams to manage feed requirements, dilution, ore loss, and material tracking.
• Optimize drilling and blasting.
• Improve blast designs and sequencing to achieve safe blasting, suitable fragmentation, efficient loading and hauling, and competitive costs. Coordinate drill-and-blast readiness with the production schedule.
• Improve equipment productivity.
• Evaluate equipment capabilities, loader-truck matching, haul cycles, availability, utilization, and delays. Use realistic production assumptions and work with operations and maintenance to address constraints.
• Monitor execution and reconcile performance.
• Compare actual production with the plan, investigate variances, identify root causes, and develop practical recovery plans. Feed operating results back into planning assumptions and schedules.
• Optimize mining performance.
• Evaluate alternative designs, sequences, and operating approaches to improve productivity, reduce costs, and maintain ore supply. Use operational data and support improvements in digital planning and automation.
• Collaborate and develop others.
• Work closely with operations, maintenance, geology, survey, geotechnical, processing, and software teams. Communicate priorities clearly, share knowledge, and mentor engineers.

What You'll Bring

• Bachelor's degree in Mining Engineering.
• 10+ years of experience in the mining industry, including substantial hands-on experience in hard-rock open pit mining operations.
• Expert proficiency in Deswik for mine design, mine planning, and production scheduling.
• Strong experience in short- and medium-term planning, operational mine design, production scheduling, and mine plan execution.
• Demonstrated experience in drill-and-blast optimization and ore and waste planning.
• Strong practical understanding of mining equipment, production rates, haulage, operational delays, and the interaction between planning, operations, and maintenance.
• Proven safety leadership and commitment to high mining industry standards and sound engineering practice.
• Strong analytical, problem-solving, and communication skills, with the ability to work effectively with field crews and multidisciplinary teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with heap-leach operations, leach-pad planning, stacking sequences, and coordination between mining and leaching.
• Experience with autonomous mining equipment, operational data systems, or automation of mine planning and production workflows.
• Our culture is built on four principles: Everyone Gets Home Safe.
• We never put speed or cost ahead of people.
• Extreme Ownership.
• We take full responsibility for outcomes, relentlessly driving toward solutions.
• Engineer Out Requirements, then Automate.
• We simplify, optimize, and then automate for scale.
• Share Your Legos.
• We collaborate openly, share knowledge, and empower each other to build bigger, better solutions.
• Join us as we build the future of responsible mineral sourcing and supply!