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!