Scanning & Data Quality Lead, CDCL

Engagement: Independent Contractor (1.0 FTE)
Target Start Date: Immediate start
Term: up to 21 months
Location: Remote (Canada-based or international; no relocation required), with periodic travel

About the Canadian Digital Core Library (CDCL)

The Canadian Digital Core Library (CDCL) is a national initiative to digitize Canada's geological drill core data and make it openly accessible through an AI-ready platform. With investment from the Government of Canada, Creative Destruction Lab is developing the CDCL platform, bringing together geological data from across Canada — including data held by provincial and territorial geological surveys — to accelerate mineral discovery, reduce exploration risk, and strengthen Canada's critical minerals sector. This role leads the standards, training, and practices that turn core scanning across many jurisdictions into a coherent national dataset for the CDCL.

Role Summary

The Scanning & Data Quality Lead is responsible for the scanning standards, training, and operational practices that turn a federated, multi-jurisdiction scanning effort into a coherent national dataset. The role requires both operational leadership and technical geoscience depth – the ability to run programs, standards, and teams at scale, paired with hands-on understanding of core scanning, data, and quality. In a program where provinces and territories select their own scanning vendors, it defines how the work is done well everywhere – setting and embedding the standards and QA/QC practices, building the capability of participating jurisdictions, and creating the shared learning that lets each build on the last. The role links scanning vendors, provinces and territories, and the platform, and is central to one of the initiative's primary objectives — a consistent Canadian standard for core scanning and geoscience data. The role works hand in hand with the product & platform leads on data hand-off into the platform, and with senior SMEs (e.g., spectral geologists) on the technical content of the standards.

Key Responsibilities

  • Own the quality and consistency of data entering the CDCL, from scanning through to ingestion - ensuring data collected by many vendors across jurisdictions meets a common, vendor-agnostic standard.

  • Lead the rollout, adoption, and enforcement of the CDCL scanning standards and data standards, translating defined standards into practical implementation across provinces, territories, and scanning vendors.

  • Develop and oversee QA/QC protocols and their implementation - defining acceptance criteria and validation checks, and ensuring they are applied both at the local (PT/vendor) level and centrally before data is served.

  • Contribute to the definition, iteration, and rollout of the CDCL scanning and data standards – bringing a scanning-operations and data-quality perspective, supporting the WS1 Technical Working Group, and translating defined standards into practical implementation across provinces, territories, and scanning vendors.

  • Lead technical engagement with scanning vendors (as appropriate), understanding their outputs and workflows and driving conformance to CDCL standards and formats.

  • Coordinate and support the in-kind and initial scanning campaigns, capturing learnings and feeding them into standards refinement.

  • Establish a knowledge-sharing and continuous-learning loop across jurisdictions, so lessons from early campaigns flow to all participants rather than each learning them independently.

  • Coordinate data hand-off into the platform with the product/platform team, and partner with the geoscience standards SME on the technical content of the standards.

Required Qualifications

  • Degree in geology, geoscience, or a related field (graduate degree an asset), or equivalent professional experience.

  • 10+ years in core scanning, core analysis, or geoscience data operations, including hands-on and leadership experience.

  • Deep, practical knowledge of multi-sensor core scanning workflows, data outputs, QA/QC, and the sources of variability across vendors and instruments.

  • Demonstrated experience building and leading technical/operational teams and delivering consistent standards across multiple sites or jurisdictions, ideally internationally.

  • Experience developing and delivering training, SOPs, or technical standards adopted by others.

  • Strong coordination and stakeholder skills across vendors, government partners, and an internal delivery team.

  • Comfort operating in a fast-paced, evolving, federated environment with distributed accountability.

Preferred Qualifications

  • Experience across the mining sector and familiarity with the core scanning vendor landscape.

  • Exposure to the software/product side of geoscience data (data visualization, delivery platforms, DevOps/sprints).

  • A neutral, vendor-agnostic position relative to the Canadian scanning market.

  • Interest in standards-setting and in building something scalable and exportable beyond Phase 1.

Application Process

Please submit a cover letter and resume to Kyle Robinson at cdcl@creativedestructionlab.com. Applications will be assessed on a rolling basis as we are looking to fill this role by October 15, 2026.