Senior Product Design Engineer

IronSite; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Daily catered lunch

Office near Oracle Park & Caltrain

Health, dental, vision, 401(k) with 6%

Job summary

IronSite in San Francisco is seeking a Senior Product Design Engineer to own the mechanical design and product architecture of wearable hardware. You will craft enclosures, mounts, and thermal systems to survive harsh jobsite conditions, collaborating across electrical, firmware, and manufacturing engineering.

Expect 5+ years shipping physical products, with hands-on wearables or rugged devices, and close work with contract manufacturers on DFM and production ramp.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of hands-on experience designing and shipping physical products, with wearables or ruggedized hardware.
• Deep experience designing camera integration and optical alignment systems.
• Experience shipping wearable products with comfort, durability, and reliability on a body all day.

Responsibilities

• Own the mechanical design end to end from concept through volume production.
• Design enclosures, mounts, and thermal systems for rugged wearables.
• Collaborate with electrical/firmware teams on PCBA integration and testing.
• Lead DFM reviews with contract manufacturers and drive tooling qualifications.

Skills

Wearables design

Camera integration

Mechanical design

Education

Mechanical Engineering

Tools

Onshape

SOLIDWORKS

Job description

Construction, a $2T+ industry, loses hundreds of billions of dollars a year in productivity because no one can see what’s really happening on site. It’s the largest blind spot in physical intelligence.

Ironsite is building the intelligence layer for the physical world. We put wearable cameras on craft workers and use vision-language models to understand how physical work gets done. Our insights show builders where time is lost and what to change, so projects finish faster and crews spend more of their day on skilled work. We’re building the foundation models for physical work, in an industry that has never had ground truth.

The Challenge

Job sites are among the hardest places in the world to build technology. Many start as bare dirt with no power or network, and change every day as the project moves forward. Our devices and network infrastructure are field-tested in extreme weather and harsh conditions, across a fleet scaling to thousands. Every night, 1,000+ hours of footage arrive, and by 5am it’s labeled by our own model, with our in-house experts reviewing anything it’s unsure of. Frontier models that solve research-level math still can’t count the blocks a mason laid over a 10-hour day. Scaled to 100,000 cameras, we’d record more video every day than the world uploads to YouTube.

Where We're Going

No one else has this data. Every day, our cameras record skilled trades doing real work, with 100+ on our largest site alone. Our own model already matches expert human labelers. Now we're building world models that predict what happens on a site tomorrow, and after that, robotics. What you build this week runs on real job sites next week.

The Role

We're hiring a Senior Product Design Engineer to own the mechanical design and product architecture of Ironsite's wearable hardware.

This is a foundational role on the hardware team. You'll design the enclosures, mechanisms, mounts, and thermal systems that let Ironsite's cameras and electronics survive on active jobsites, on ruggedized wearables that spend all day exposed to dust, moisture, impact, temperature extremes, and the kind of abuse most consumer wearables never see. Fit, ergonomics, sealing, thermal performance, drop and vibration resilience, and manufacturability are all important for this role. If the mechanical design doesn't hold up, nothing else does.

You'll work directly with electrical, firmware, and manufacturing engineering across the full product lifecycle, from initial concept through volume production. You'll own enclosure design, camera mounting and alignment, mechanism design, sealing and gasketing, thermal management, and DFM partnership with our contract manufacturer.

What You'll Build

Mechanical design and product architecture

• Own the mechanical design of Ironsite's wearable hardware end to end, from initial concept and industrial design collaboration through DFM, tooling, and volume production.
• Design enclosures, mechanisms, and mounts for wearable devices that integrate cameras, PCBAs, batteries, and sensor subassemblies into a small, lightweight, comfortable form factor.
• Balance the tradeoffs that matter in a wearable that has to sit on a hardhat all day: weight, size, thermal performance, sealing, ergonomics, and manufacturability.
• Partner with industrial design on the aesthetic, ergonomic, and integration decisions that determine how Ironsite looks and feels.

Camera integration and alignment

• Design the mechanical systems that hold the camera in precise optical alignment across temperature, vibration, and impact.
• Own the tolerances, mounting geometry, and manufacturing controls that keep image quality consistent across every device in the fleet.
• Partner with electrical and firmware engineering on camera bring-up and image quality validation.

Sealing, thermal, and ruggedization

• Design sealing and gasketing systems that hit IP67 targets in real jobsite conditions (dust, moisture, weather exposure).
• Design thermal management systems that keep the device operating reliably across environmental extremes and continuous recording loads.
• Own drop, vibration, and environmental test plans, and iterate on designs until they pass in the field, not just in the lab.

Manufacturing and DFM

• Design for mass production from day one. Sheet metal, injection-molded plastics, custom castings, and electromechanical assemblies.
• Own the DFM review process with our contract manufacturer, drive tooling qualification, and support first-article inspection and production ramp.
• Partner with manufacturing engineering on tooling strategy, cycle time reduction, and yield improvement initiatives.

Cross-functional partnership

• Collaborate with electrical and firmware engineers on PCBA integration, connectors, cable routing, and system-level design decisions.
• Represent mechanical engineering in design reviews, and drive design decisions that balance mechanical, electrical, firmware, and manufacturing constraints.
• Support contract manufacturers with technical guidance, design updates, and issue resolution during production ramp.

Technical Challenges You'll Solve

• Designing wearable hardware that survives active jobsites. Consumer wearables don't have to survive what construction wearables do. Dust, moisture, temperature extremes, direct impact, sustained vibration, and 8-12 hour daily use for years. You'll design the mechanical systems that hold up in the harshest wearable environment in the world.
• Holding optical alignment across environmental extremes. The camera has to stay in precise optical alignment through drops, temperature changes, and continuous vibration on a moving worker's head. Small mechanical shifts translate to image quality degradation at scale. You'll design the tolerances and mounting systems that keep the whole fleet in spec.
• Fitting more into less. Every new generation of Ironsite hardware needs to be more capable while getting smaller, lighter, and more comfortable. You'll make the density, weight, and ergonomic tradeoffs that let us pack more into less without compromising the workforce experience or the product performance.
• Designing for hundreds of thousands of units. Every mechanical decision has manufacturability, cost, and yield implications that compound at scale. You'll design for high-volume production from day one, and partner with manufacturing engineering to drive the DFM iterations that make ramp smooth rather than painful.
• Sealing and thermals at the wearable scale. IP67 in a device small enough to embed in a hardhat, thermal management for continuous camera and inference workloads, and durability that lasts years.

What We’re Looking For

Required

• 5+ years of hands-on experience designing and shipping physical products, with at least one full product lifecycle delivered in wearables, cameras, or ruggedized consumer or industrial hardware at real volume.
• Deep experience designing camera integration and optical alignment systems. You've owned mechanical integration of imaging systems in production and can speak concretely about the tolerances, mounting strategies, and IQ tradeoffs you made.
• Experience shipping wearable products. You know what it takes to design something that has to be comfortable, durable, and reliable on a person's body for a full day, every day.
• Deep expertise designing rugged electromechanical devices for harsh outdoor environments, including sealing, gasketing, and thermal management for enclosures containing electronics.
• Strong experience designing parts for mass production, particularly sheet metal and injection-molded plastics.
• Hands‑on experience working directly with contract manufacturers through DFM reviews, first‑article inspection, tooling qualification, and production ramp.
• Proficiency with parametric CAD (Onshape, SOLIDWORKS, Siemens NX, Creo, or similar) and comfort with tolerance analysis, FEA, and DFM analysis tools.
• Strong cross‑functional collaboration with electrical and firmware engineers on PCBA integration, connectors, cable routing, and system‑level architecture.
• A background in Mechanical Engineering, Product Design Engineering, or a related field, or the equivalent experience.

Strongly preferred

• Experience shipping wearable products at consumer volumes (Fitbit, Oura, Whoop, GoPro, Bose, Apple, Meta, Snap, or similar).
• Experience designing IP‑rated devices (IP65 or higher) for outdoor or industrial use.
• Experience with drop, vibration, and environmental test design and validation.
• Experience with high‑volume injection molding, tooling strategy, and mold flow analysis.
• Ability to generate clear technical documentation for internal teams, contract manufacturers, and executive stakeholders.

Nice to have

• Familiarity with contract manufacturers in Taiwan, mainland China, or Southeast Asia.
• Experience designing helmets, headwear, PPE, or other head‑mounted wearables.
• FCC, CE, or other regulatory certification for wearable devices.
• Battery pack and optical subassembly mechanical integration.
• Familiarity with electrical CAD (Altium, KiCad, Eagle).
• Early mechanical or PDE hire at a hardware startup that scaled to full production.

What Success Looks Like

• First 90 days. You know our hardware platform cold and have improved a current or upcoming hardware revision.
• First 6 months. You've owned a major mechanical initiative end to end, like a next‑gen enclosure, a sealing or thermal redesign, or a form‑factor improvement.
• First 12 months. You're Ironsite's authority on mechanical design, and your designs hold up as we scale to hundreds of thousands of devices.
• Full benefits including health, dental, vision, and 401(k) with 6% match
• Daily catered lunch
• Office next to Oracle Park and the Caltrain

Final compensation is determined by experience, location, and level.

Compensation

Base pay range: $180,000 – $260,000 per year.