MLOps Engineer

About Grassroots Carbon

Grassroots Carbon is the leading grasslands restoration and soil carbon storage company that partners with landowners to implement and scale regenerative land management practices. In addition to enhancing soil health, promoting biodiversity, and improving water quality, these regenerative practices have tremendous potential to combat climate change by drawing down large quantities of atmospheric CO2 into the soil. Grassroots Carbon is proud to have partnered with ranchers across 1.6 million acres in 22 states to implement practices that restore grasslands, improve bird habitats, build soil health, and drive nature-based soil organic carbon drawdown through the healthy soils. Built on a foundation of scientific rigor, quality, and transparency, Grassroots Carbon has built strong partnerships with Audubon Conservation Ranching, Texas Agricultural Land Trust, Understand Ag, and Colorado State University's Soil Carbon Solutions Center while generating high-quality soil carbon drawdown credits for leading corporations, including Nestle, Microsoft, Shopify, Marathon Oil, H-E-B, Olipop, and Urban Villages, to offset their carbon impact and reach their sustainability goals.

Grassroots Carbon is proud to be a portfolio company of Soilworks Natural Capital

The Opportunity

Grassroots Carbon is seeking a hands-on AI/ML Ops Engineer to build and maintain the data infrastructure powering our carbon measurement, rancher tools, and emerging AI-native applications.

You'll work at the intersection of our Data Science and Product teams, translating experimental models into production systems while building the connectors that enable real-time data flows across our platform. This role is critical to our 2026 goals: delivering AI-native ranch management tools, scaling our MRV (Measurement, Reporting, Verification) capabilities, and enabling third-party hardware integrations that put actionable intelligence directly into ranchers' hands.

We're looking for someone who thrives on building reliable infrastructure, has strong opinions about data quality, and can work autonomously in a fast-moving environment where the roadmap is ambitious and the problems are genuinely novel.

Key Responsibilities

Data Pipeline Infrastructure

• Design, build, and maintain scalable ETL pipelines for soil carbon data, satellite imagery, weather data, and ranch management inputs
• Productionize data science team outputs, transforming research models (process-based and machine learning) into reliable, monitored production systems
• Build and maintain data validation, monitoring, and alerting systems that catch issues before they impact downstream users
• Own data quality and lineage across the platform, ensuring our carbon calculations maintain the scientific rigor our protocols require

ML Operations & Model Deployment

• Deploy and monitor ML models for soil carbon stock change prediction, biomass estimation, and ranch management photo verification systems
• Build inference pipelines that serve predictions to both internal dashboards and customer-facing applications
• Implement model versioning, A/B testing infrastructure, and rollback capabilities
• Optimize model performance for cost efficiency at scale (we're running models across millions of acres)

Integration & Connectivity

• Build real-time data connectors for third-party hardware integrations (GPS tracking, virtual fencing, scale systems, weather stations)
• Develop APIs that expose ML predictions and aggregated data to internal teams and external partners
• Work with engineering to integrate data capabilities into PastureMap's mobile and web applications
• Support protocol compliance by ensuring data pipelines meet CAR, Verra, and emerging standard requirements

Collaboration & Technical Leadership

• Partner with Data Science to understand model requirements and translate research code into production-ready systems
• Work with Product to scope data requirements for new features and ensure technical feasibility
• Document systems thoroughly and establish operational runbooks
• Contribute to architectural decisions
  
  ** This role is roughly 50% data pipeline work, 30% model deployment/monitoring, 20% integrations **

Requirements

Requirements

What We're Looking For

• 3-5+ years of experience in data engineering, ML engineering, or MLOps roles
• Strong Python skills with production experience in data processing frameworks (Airflow, Prefect, or similar orchestration tools)
• Experience deploying and monitoring ML models in production (MLflow, SageMaker, Vertex AI, or similar)
• Hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS or GCP preferred: Lambda, S3, EC2, Step Functions, RDS or their GCP equivalent)
• Working knowledge of SQL and experience with both relational and time-series data
• Experience building and consuming REST APIs
• Familiarity with geospatial data processing 
• Experience with satellite imagery, remote sensing, or environmental data 

What You'll Demonstrate

• Ability to work autonomously and make sound technical decisions with limited guidance
• Strong debugging skills and a methodical approach to troubleshooting production issues
• Clear communication with both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Comfort with ambiguity and rapidly evolving requirements
• Genuine interest in climate, agriculture, and/or environmental technology

Why Join Grassroots Carbon

• High-Growth Opportunity: Build foundational infrastructure for a company scaling rapidly in the carbon markets space
• Tangible Climate Impact: Your pipelines directly enable carbon measurement and rancher payments across millions of acres
• Novel Technical Challenges: Work with unique datasets (soil samples, satellite imagery, livestock movements) and genuinely unsolved problems
• Collaborative Team: Join a lean, high-performing team where your contributions are visible and valued
• Competitive Compensation & Benefits: Competitive base salary, performance-based bonus, equity participation, health/dental/vision insurance, flexible PTO, 401(k), and support for professional development

Benefits

• Health Insurance, with plans as low as $0 deductible and $0 co-pay
• Dental and vision insurance plans
• Flexible spending account option
• Open Paid Time Off Policy plus 9 paid holidays per year
• Participation in our 401(k) savings plan
• Company-paid Life and AD&D coverage
• Educational materials and expenses to support continuing education opportunities

About Soilworks Natural Capital

Grassroots Carbon is proud to be a portfolio company of Soilworks Natural Capital, which provides shared services to our fast-growing company. Soilworks is a private equity fund that invests in, incubates, and acquires companies to help accelerate the Regenerative Agriculture movement and is on a mission to prove Regenerative grazing is the most profitable way to ranch. Soilworks principles include better and healthier food, restoring plant and animal diversity, regenerating soil to store water and carbon, and creating more profitable family farms. Soilworks was launched by the co-founders of Scaleworks, a technology venture equity fund based in San Antonio, TX.

We are proud to foster a workplace free from discrimination. We strongly believe that diversity of experience, perspectives, and background leads to a better environment for our employees and a better experience for our users and our customers. We are an equal-opportunity employer and do not discriminate against protected characteristics. All candidates will be given the same consideration.