Staff Mining Engineer at Mariana Minerals in Moab, UT

Job description

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 leade