Head of Field Applications

Ironsite AI•San Francisco, CA

6d•$200,000 - $300,000•Onsite

About The Position

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.

Requirements

8+ years of software engineering experience with 3+ years managing engineers, ideally including managers or multiple teams.
Hands-on depth in mobile (iOS/Android) and experience shipping software that manages hardware in the field: device provisioning, MDM, OTA, telemetry, or fleet management.
Experience running or building a forward deployed engineering function, or equivalent customer-embedded engineering work where you owned outcomes on the customer's turf.
Strong product judgment. You can tell the difference between what a customer asks for and what they need, and between a one-off and a platform feature.
Comfort on active jobsites and real respect for craft workers. You'll spend time in the field, and the software you own has to earn a crew's trust.
High agency and comfort with ambiguity. You build the process and the team while shipping.

Nice To Haves

Prior FDE, solutions engineering, or deployment engineering leadership at a hardware-plus-software company: wearables, robotics, IoT, cameras, or industrial systems.
Experience with offline-first mobile architecture and sync in low-connectivity environments.
Exposure to construction, energy, manufacturing, or other industrial customers.
Technical degree (CS, engineering, or similar) or equivalent experience.

Responsibilities

Build and lead the Field Applications engineering org: forward deployed engineers and the mobile/device software team. Hire, manage, grow, and set the bar.
Own the forward deployed engineering model. Define how FDEs embed with customers, scope and deliver project-specific integrations and workflows, and feed what they learn back into the core product.
Own the craft worker experience end to end: the mobile app workers and foremen use for onboarding, opt-in, device check-out and check-in, and shift-level feedback. Make it fast, obvious, and trusted by people who don't want another app.
Own mobile device deployment at scale: provisioning, fleet management, OTA updates, telemetry, and offline-first behavior across thousands of devices on sites with unreliable connectivity.
Drive the productization decision. Recognize when a customer-specific build should become a platform feature, and when it shouldn't.
Partner with hardware and firmware on the device-to-app boundary, and with platform and AI teams on how captured data flows from the site into the pipeline.
Own field-facing reliability: define and track fleet uptime, capture coverage, app adoption, and deployment health, and be on the hook when they slip.
Represent the field in roadmap and architecture discussions. You're the voice in the room for what actually works on a jobsite.