Would You Take This Job? – Mining Engineer at Kiewit Mining Group

Job Title: Mining Engineer
Company: Kiewit Mining Group
Location: Soda Springs, Idaho
Type: Full-time
Salary: Not listed

Requirements:

  • Bachelor’s degree in Mining Engineering or related field

  • Experience in mine operations, design, or field-based engineering

  • Strong leadership, communication, and organizational skills

  • Willingness to work on-site in a remote area and travel as needed

Responsibilities:

  • Support mine operations with short-range planning and daily engineering tasks

  • Develop and manage budgets, production goals, and safety compliance

  • Collaborate with superintendents and crews to ensure efficient mining activities

  • Mentor field engineers and provide technical expertise in operations

  • Perform analysis and modeling to support design and decision-making

Click here for more job details and a link to apply.

Would You Take It?

This role offers a chance to work with one of the most established mining teams in North America. You’ll gain deep field experience, take part in meaningful operations, and grow your engineering career—but it comes with location trade-offs, rugged work, and the demands of an on-site position.

Would you take this job? Why or why not?

If you’re serious, ask about housing and winter logistics - Soda Springs gets brutally cold, and more than once my day started chaining up trucks and de-icing pumps before any planning work. The tradeoff is great exposure to ops; shadowing a shovel foreman for two weeks taught me more about cycle times and blast patterns than a semester of class.

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weeks taught me more about cycle times and blast patterns than a semester of class. Grab a simple acoustic tube earpiece for your radio — my first month in Soda Springs I kept missing shovel moves in the wind, and once I used the earpiece my dispatch clarity (and cycle times) jumped. Did they say what radios they run?

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Ask what their software stack is (Deswik/MineSight + fleet dispatch) and whether you get formal training in month one; at my last site, not knowing their templates meant every haul-road calc got rebuilt after review… Also clarify the office-to-pit split and who signs off your designs — two days on design and three shadowing ops kept me sane and got approvals moving.

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Clarify 12-hour rotations and nights; ‘remote area’ plus travel wears you down — some folks love the overtime… MSHA: Training | Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA).

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