About Ironsite
Ironsite is building the intelligence layer for the physical world. We design our own wearable hardware, deploy it alongside craft workers, and transform a shift's footage into a next-morning report. Our internal team and purpose-built models label the data overnight and deliver actionable insights to superintendents by 5 AM.
We are accelerating the speed, efficiency, and predictability of construction, especially for complex, mission-critical infrastructure projects, including data centers, LNG facilities, sports stadiums, hospitals, and other large-scale developments, by training AI models on egocentric construction footage and labor productivity data. We are built with a pro-worker philosophy at our core: we believe technology should empower the workforce, not replace it. We're working to give craft workers and project leaders better visibility into what's happening on-site, while creating a system where the reality of construction and the chaos of each day are finally available to the people running the project.
Ironsite is deployed across several of the largest active construction projects in the country. To date, we've captured more than 100,000 hours of construction footage across seven states, now process thousands of hours of site activity every day, and maintain a worker opt-out rate below two percent. This is enabled by a workforce-first architecture that anonymizes devices, captures no audio, and never releases raw video.
Ironsite is backed by leading investors (8VC, South Park Commons, Saga Ventures) and prominent operators across technology and construction, including Eric Schmidt, Jeff Dean, Jeff Rothschild, Mark Leslie, Scott Wu, Eric Glyman, Karim Atiyeh, Russell Kaplan, and others, alongside over a dozen construction industry operators who have joined us as partners in building this.
Longer term, we believe Ironsite is the foundation for what construction becomes in the next decade. The systems we're building will be the operating system for how the physical world gets built. We see a future where craft workers are more valued, more visible, and better paid for the skill they bring, and where the industry finally has the intelligence layer that makes autonomous construction possible. Both start with the same foundation.
The Role
We're hiring our first Head of Platform to lead the team building Ironsite's platform, the product surface that turns our data into the intelligence construction teams act on every day.
You'll own the technical direction, execution, and growth of the platform engineering team as we scale from a small IC-heavy group into a full function over the next 18 to 24 months. The team you'll lead owns the dashboards project leaders open at 5 AM, the labor-management tools superintendents run their entire jobsite on, the mobile experience craft workers carry in their pocket, and the integration layer that connects Ironsite to the software the industry already lives in.
You'll partner directly with our CTO on technical strategy, and work in parallel with our Head of Infrastructure, who owns the systems layer underneath the platform. Together, the two of you own the technical foundation for what Ironsite ships to customers. You'll set the technical bar across the platform team through architectural decisions, code reviews, hiring calibration, and the standard of judgment you bring to every conversation.
This is a leadership role, not an IC role. Your primary job is building and leading the platform team. But you're the kind of leader who is genuinely in the code every week, reviewing PRs across your team, contributing to architectural decisions at the design level, and shipping code alongside your engineers when the work calls for it. The best engineering leaders never lose the technical muscle that got them here. You review, you build, you lead, and you make sure the platform gets stronger every quarter.
What You'll Own
Platform strategy and technical direction.
• Own the technical strategy for the platform engineering team in partnership with the CTO.
• Set the architectural direction for the platform (dashboards, labor-management tools, craft worker mobile experience, integrations, ground truth tooling), and make sure the seams between them stay clean as the surface area grows.
• Partner closely with the Head of Infrastructure to make sure the platform and the underlying infrastructure evolve together, not in tension.
• Review meaningful PRs and architectural decisions across your team. You're the technical review layer that catches problems before they ship.
• Contribute code weekly. Whether it's a critical fix, a proof of concept for a new architecture, or shipping alongside a team on a hard problem, you're in the codebase, not just around it.
Team leadership and org design.
• Own the platform team's org design: how the team is structured, how it communicates, how decisions get made, and how work flows.
• Hire, mentor, and manage the platform engineering team, including engineering managers as the team grows.
• Build the operating cadence: planning rhythms, code review standards, technical rituals, on-call practices, and how the team runs day to day.
• Set the culture that makes Ironsite's platform team a place where great engineers want to be. Bar-raising, high-agency, deeply technical, and honest about what's working and what's not.
Delivery and execution.
• Own the platform team's delivery. Ship on time, ship well, and be honest about tradeoffs.
• Drive the delivery discipline that turns ambitious plans into shipped products and that makes engineering a partner to product and business, not a bottleneck.
• Own the metrics that matter for the team: velocity, quality, reliability, and business impact of what ships.
Growth and scaling the function.
• Scale the platform team from where it is today into a real engineering function over the next 18 to 24 months, without losing the culture, technical bar, or delivery quality that got us here.
• Partner with the founding recruiter and talent team on hiring strategy, comp calibration, and closing top candidates.
• Build the career growth paths, performance frameworks, and internal mobility model that make the platform team a place engineers stay and grow.
Product and business partnership.
• Partner with product, design, hardware, and research leadership on what the platform team builds and why.
• Bring engineering judgment to conversations about pricing, packaging, product strategy, and how Ironsite competes in the market.
• Represent the platform team externally when needed: customer conversations, partner meetings, and recruiting.
Technical Challenges You'll Own
• Turning raw model output into insights that have to be right by 5 AM. Every night, our system processes thousands of hours of jobsite video into production reports that superintendents open before the crews arrive on site. The deadline is real, the reports have to be trustworthy, and the underlying model outputs are messy at the scale we operate. Your team owns the data layer and reporting surface that makes this happen without fail.
• Building the integration layer for an industry running on legacy tools. Ironsite has to interoperate with Procore, Autodesk, Trimble, and a long tail of ERP and payroll systems that are decades old and often internally inconsistent. Your team designs the architecture that lets Ironsite pull ground-truth data from and push insights back into systems the industry actually uses, while insulating our platform from the chaos of those interfaces.
• Scaling the platform to handle orders-of-magnitude growth. The platform will need to support tens of thousands of craft workers, hundreds of thousands of devices, and millions of hours of processed video over the next few years. You'll make the architectural decisions today that hold up when the workload becomes real.
• Building the technical bar and keeping it high as the team grows. At a small team, the founding engineers can review everything. As the team scales, no one person can. You'll build the review culture, the architecture standards, and the mentorship model that keeps the bar rising as we grow, not falling.
• Balancing speed with quality. The platform team is shipping fast because the business is growing fast. Your job is to make sure we ship at speed without accumulating debt that slows us down in 12 months.
What We're Looking For
Required
• 10+ years of engineering experience, with at least 4 years in senior engineering leadership roles (Staff/Principal + management, Director of Engineering, Head of Engineering, or VP of Engineering) at a company you're proud of.
• Deep hands-on technical expertise across the modern web stack (React/TypeScript, Node.js, PostgreSQL, Redis, AWS). You can read, review, and write production code, and you still do. Weekly, at minimum.
• Strong track record of shipping systems that scaled by orders of magnitude in throughput, users, or data volume, and doing so without over-engineering early or accumulating dead architectural weight late.
• Demonstrated leadership at scale: you've hired, mentored, and managed engineering teams of at least 10 to 30 people, including managers who reported to you.
• Systems thinking that spans the full stack and cross-team integration. You care as much about the seams between systems and the seams between teams.
• Real ability to partner with founders and other functional leaders. You've worked directly with technical founders before, held your ground, and made them and their companies better.
• A background in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, or a related technical field, or the equivalent hands-on experience.
Strongly preferred
• Experience as the first or founding platform engineering leader at a Series A or B startup, where you built the function from a small IC-heavy team into a real engineering org.
• Experience at a company that combined hardware and software, or at a company deploying software into industrial, field, or physical-world environments.
• Deep experience with data infrastructure, API design, third-party integrations, or real-time data and analytics surfaces.
• A history of raising the bar around you: promoting engineers from Senior to Staff, Staff to Principal, and IC to Manager. Building the next generation of engineering leaders.
Nice to have
• Experience shipping products that had to work reliably for non-technical users in real-world conditions (mobile field applications, industrial software, etc.).
• Experience with AI-adjacent engineering, especially at the seams between research teams and production engineering.
• Genuine excitement about industries that have been underserved by software, and interest in becoming the person who leads the team that builds the platform the physical world runs on.
What Success Looks Like
• First 30 days. You know the platform team, the codebase, the roadmap, and every engineer on the team. You've built strong relationships with our CTO, the Head of Infrastructure, and the leadership team. You've identified the top three areas where the team needs to strengthen fastest: architecture, team composition, delivery discipline, or something else. You've reviewed enough code to have real opinions on the state of the codebase.
• First 3 months. The platform team is shipping with clear delivery discipline. Code review standards are raising the bar across the team. You've made or scoped the first key hires, and the leads underneath you are visibly better because of your mentorship. You're contributing code weekly on real problems. The architectural direction you're driving is visible in what's shipping.
• First 6 months. You're the internal authority on how Ironsite's platform team operates. The team has scaled meaningfully, the technical bar has risen, and Ironsite ships faster and better than we did a year ago. When we scale from thousands of devices to hundreds of thousands, we do it because the team you built, the technical direction you drove, and the culture you established hold up.
Location, Compensation, & Perks
• San Francisco Bay Area (on-site)
• Base salary: $300k-$375k per year, commensurate with experience
• Meaningful founding-team equity.
• Full benefits including health, dental, vision, and 401(k) with 6% match
• Daily catered lunch
• Office in San Francisco, next to Oracle Park and the Caltrain
Final compensation is determined by experience, location, and level.
Why This Role
Every category-defining company had a platform engineering leader who was the reason the product actually worked at scale. Not the person who managed the team from a distance, but the person who was in the code every week, set the technical bar through their own work, made the hard architectural calls, and made sure the team got stronger every quarter.
Ironsite is at that moment. We have the product, the customers, the funding, and a founding team that's already earned the right to scale. What we need now is the Head of Platform who is going to build the team that ships the intelligence layer for the physical world.
If you've led platform teams at high-growth companies, still write and review code every week, and want to build the team that shapes what Ironsite becomes over the next decade, we want to talk.