Head of Platform

ironsite-ai; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 260,000 - 380,000; Full time

Job summary

Ironsite in San Francisco is hiring its first Head of Platform to lead the team building Ironsite's platform—the product surface that turns data into actionable insights for on-site teams.

You’ll own the platform's technical direction, drive architecture decisions, and mentor engineers while partnering with the CTO and Head of Infrastructure.

This leadership role demands hands-on code contribution and a track record of scaling platforms to support thousands of workers and devices.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of engineering experience with senior leadership.
• Strong hands-on coding ability and system design.
• Proven track record leading platform teams.

Responsibilities

• Own platform strategy and technical direction.
• Lead platform engineering team and design org.
• Drive delivery discipline and metrics.
• Collaborate with product, design, hardware, and research leadership.
• Balance speed with quality in shipping.

Skills

Engineering leadership

Platform architecture

Code review

Tools

React/TypeScript

Node.js

PostgreSQL

Redis

AWS

Job description

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 is 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. We think the systems we’re building are the operating system for how the physical world gets built, and will unlock a fundamentally different way of respect for our workforce. One 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 futures 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