AI Platform Engineer Jobs in Texas

Location: San Antonio, Texas (on-site)

About Ranchflow

Ranchflow builds AI-powered livestock monitoring and virtual fencing for ranchers. Solar-powered GPS smart collars track location, monitor animal health, and use audio cues to keep cattle within virtual boundaries drawn in the Ranchflow app. There are no posts, wires, or fence maintenance.

Founded by ranchers and technologists, Ranchflow turns years of field observation into AI insights that help producers catch illness early, run rotational grazing easily, and raise healthier herds. Ranchflow is headquartered in San Antonio, Texas with offices in Canada. Learn more at www.ranchflow.ai.

We are hiring the person who builds the software platform all of this runs on.

The Role

Ranchflow's collars are only as good as the software behind them. Today, ranchers draw a fence on their phone, move a herd, and get an alert when something is wrong. Tomorrow, that same software needs to be a platform: the place where Ranchflow's collars, future hardware devices (gate sensors, water monitors, base stations, trackers) and third-party software integrations all plug in and work together.

You will own that platform: what it is, how it's built, and how fast it ships. You will build it with AI from day one, using agents to write, test, operate and support the product, so a very small team ships like a much larger one.

This is a builder's job inside a small, fast company. You will talk to ranchers, decide what matters, build it (or direct agents and engineers to), put it in front of real customers, and fix what breaks. You report to the CPO and Co-Founder, with a dotted line to our investors, and work daily with Ranchflow's hardware, firmware and wireless teams.

Product manager or engineer, both are welcome. You do not need to write production code yourself. You do need to have personally built and shipped working AI agents, and to be able to take a vague problem to a deployed solution with your own hands.

What you'll do

• Own the platform end to end. Define the architecture, roadmap and priorities for the software that every Ranchflow collar runs on: accounts, herds, pastures, virtual boundaries, device management, alerts, and animal location and health data.
• Build the rancher experience, phone first. Ranchers work from a truck or a pasture with one hand and spotty signal. Draw and move fences, check the herd, and act on alerts in a few taps. The laptop view handles planning, reporting and multi-ranch management.
• Design for offline and intermittent connectivity. Pastures have gaps in coverage. Define how boundary updates, acknowledgements and alerts sync across cellular, long-range radio and satellite links, and what a collar does when it can't reach the cloud.
• Make it a platform other devices and software can layer on. Design the device interface, APIs and SDK so new hardware (gates, water sensors, base stations, trackers) and outside software (ranch records, weather, marketplaces, veterinary tools) integrate without rewrites.
• Work hand in hand with hardware. Agree on the contract between collar firmware, wireless and the cloud with the hardware team: messaging, firmware updates, battery and data budgets, and how new device types get onboarded.
• Build an agent layer for ranch operations. Ship agents that do real work: onboarding a new ranch, triaging alerts, suggesting grazing moves, spotting animals that look sick, and answering support questions. Every agent action is traceable and approved by a human where the stakes are high.
• Run the product AI-natively. Use agents and AI tools across spec writing, coding, testing, release, monitoring and customer support. Set the standard for how Ranchflow builds.
• Stay close to the ranch. Visit customers, watch them use the product, and turn what you see into the next release.
• Hire and direct builders. Pull in contract engineers, agencies or full-time hires where they help, and hold them to a high bar.

What success looks like

First 90 days

• Ride along with customers and the hardware team, and write the platform's architecture and roadmap.
• Ship a measurable improvement to the rancher phone app, and a first working agent that handles a real ranch task.
• Agree the device interface with hardware, so a new device type can be added without changes to the core.

First 12 months

• The platform runs the full Ranchflow collar fleet reliably, including in low-coverage pastures.
• At least one non-collar device and one third-party software integration are live on the platform.
• Agents handle a meaningful share of onboarding, alert triage and support, with traceable outputs and human approval on high-risk actions.
• Ranchers choose to run their operation from their phone, and say so.

What you'll bring

• Proven AI and agentic build capability. You have personally built and deployed AI agents that real users or a real business depend on, not demos or prompt libraries. You can walk us through what the agent did, what tools it called, how you tested it, what broke, and what you changed.
• People leadership. You will manage people as the team grows. You have led, coached and held engineers, contractors or product people to a high bar.
• Real agent engineering judgment. You know how to give agents tools and context, evaluate their output, put guardrails and human approval around risky actions, and keep cost and reliability under control. Experience with tool calling, MCP, agent frameworks (LangGraph, CrewAI, Claude Agent SDK or similar) and evals is a plus.
• An entrepreneurial streak. You have started something, run a product from zero, or been the first product or engineering hire at a small company. You make decisions without waiting for a committee and treat the company's money as your own.
• Hands-on problem solving. When something is broken at 6am in a pasture, you dig in. You are comfortable in logs, data, the command line and AI coding tools, and you ship fixes yourself.
• Product and UX sense for non-technical users in rough conditions. You have a feel for UX and know that features are easy and customer experience is the hard part. You have shipped a mobile-first product that people used in the field, on the job or with poor connectivity, and you know how to make each step simple and what users will and won't tolerate.
• Platform thinking. You have designed APIs, integrations or data models that other teams or partners built on, and you know the cost of getting the contract wrong.
• Comfort with connected devices. You have worked on IoT, hardware, telemetry or fleet management, or you can show you learn that world fast. You can talk with firmware and wireless engineers without a translator.
• Clear, direct communication. You can explain a technical tradeoff to a rancher, a hardware engineer and a CEO in the same day.
• Based in San Antonio, TX. This is an on-site role at our San Antonio headquarters.

You're probably not the fit if

• Your AI experience is mainly using ChatGPT or Copilot, not building and deploying agents.
• You prefer to manage backlogs and write specs rather than build and ship.
• You need a large team, long planning cycles or detailed direction to be effective.

Nice to have

• Experience in agriculture, livestock, ag-tech or other rural and field-service software
• Experience with GPS, geofencing, mapping or geospatial data
• Background in messaging protocols for devices (MQTT or similar) and over-the-air firmware updates
• Experience with long-range or low-power networks (LoRaWAN, satellite, cellular IoT)
• Familiarity with computer vision or sensor-data models for animal behavior or health
• Grew up on, or spent time working on, a ranch or farm

• Premier Health Insurance plan with $0 deductible and $0 co-pay
• Dental and vision insurance plans
• Flexible spending account options
• Open Paid Time Off Policy plus nine paid public holidays
• Participation in our 401(k) savings plan
• Company-paid Life and AD&D coverage
• Educational materials and expenses to support related development

About Soilworks Natural Capital:

Ranchflow is part of the Soilworks Natural Capital portfolio. We invest in and build companies that make ranching more profitable through rotational grazing and ranching intelligence.

No visa sponsorship is available for this position.