VP of Platform Engineering

Ironsite AI•San Francisco, CA

1d•$300,000 - $375,000•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. We're hiring our first VP of Platform Engineering to lead the engineering organization at Ironsite. You'll own the technical direction, execution, and growth of the entire engineering team as we scale from ~20 engineers today to well over 100 in the next 18 to 24 months. Every function that ships code at Ironsite reports up through you: platform, mobile, infrastructure, and the engineering coordination with our hardware and research teams. Your job is to make sure the engineering org can deliver the technical foundation for what Ironsite is becoming. You'll partner directly with our CTO on the broader technical strategy of the company, with product on what we build and why, and with the founding team on how engineering fits into every major business decision. You'll set the technical bar across the entire engineering org 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 engineering organization. But you're the kind of leader who is genuinely in the code every week, reviewing PRs across teams, contributing to architectural decisions at the design level, and shipping code alongside your engineers when the work calls for it. The best VPs of Engineering never lose the technical muscle that got them here. You review, you build, you lead, and you make sure the engineering org gets stronger every quarter.

Requirements

Deep full-stack expertise, comfortable owning a system end-to-end from the browser to the database and everything in between. You've made real judgment calls on modern frontend (React/TypeScript), backend services (Node.js, PostgreSQL, Redis), and cloud infrastructure (AWS), and you know when each tool is the right one and when it isn't.
A strong track record with API design, third-party integrations, and real-time data and analytics surfaces — specifically the ability to build systems where correctness, performance, and clarity for downstream teams all matter at the same time.
Experience shipping web applications at scale, in production, with the kind of reliability construction customers won't tolerate the absence of.
Systems thinking that spans end-to-end product architecture and cross-team integration. You care as much about the seams between systems as the systems themselves.
Typically 8+ years of engineering experience, with meaningful time spent operating at a Staff/Principal level at a company you're proud of.
12+ years of engineering experience, with at least 5 years in senior engineering leadership roles (Director of Engineering, VP of Engineering, or Head of Engineering) at a company you're proud of.
Deep hands-on technical expertise. You can read, review, and write production code across the modern web stack (React/TypeScript, Node.js, PostgreSQL, Redis, AWS), and you still do. Weekly, at minimum.
A track record of leading engineering organizations that scaled by orders of magnitude in team size, product surface, or user volume, and doing so without losing the technical bar or the culture.
Demonstrated leadership at scale: you've hired, mentored, and managed engineering teams of at least 20 to 50 people, including managers who reported to you.
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.
Systems thinking that spans the full stack and the full org. You care as much about the seams between systems and the seams between teams.
Real ability to partner with founders. 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.

Nice To Haves

Experience as the first or founding VP of Engineering 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.
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 engineering foundation the physical world runs on.

Responsibilities

Own the technical strategy for the engineering organization in partnership with the CTO.
Set the architectural direction across the platform, mobile, and infrastructure teams, and make sure the seams between them stay clean as the surface area grows.
Review meaningful PRs and architectural decisions across every engineering 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.
Represent engineering in every company-level strategic conversation.
Own the engineering org design: how teams are structured, how they communicate, how decisions get made, and how work flows across the org.
Hire, mentor, and manage the engineering leadership team: platform leads, mobile leads, infrastructure leads, and eventually engineering managers underneath them.
Build the operating cadence for engineering: planning rhythms, code review standards, technical rituals, on-call practices, incident response, and how the engineering org runs day to day.
Set the culture that makes Ironsite a place where great engineers want to be. Bar-raising, high-agency, deeply technical, and honest about what's working and what's not.
Own the engineering delivery for the entire product surface. 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 org: velocity, quality, reliability, and business impact of what ships.
Scale the engineering org from ~30 to well over 100 in 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 Ironsite a place engineers stay and grow.
Partner with engineering, hardware, and product leadership on what the engineering org builds and why.
Bring engineering judgment to conversations about pricing, packaging, product strategy, and how Ironsite competes in the market.
Represent engineering externally when needed: customer conversations, partner meetings, and eventually recruiting the next generation of leaders.
Turning a hardware, software, and AI business into a coherent technical organization. Ironsite is running at the intersection of hardware, firmware, cloud infrastructure, AI research, and customer-facing product. The engineering org has to work seamlessly across all of these, which is a genuinely hard technical and organizational challenge. You'll make the calls that keep the org coherent as it grows.
Building the technical bar and keeping it high as we scale. At 30 engineers, the founding team can review everything. At 100+, no one person can. You'll build the review culture, the architecture standards, and the mentorship model that keeps the technical bar rising as we grow, not falling.
Scaling from thousands of devices to hundreds of thousands. The systems we build today have to scale by orders of magnitude in the next few years. You'll make the architectural decisions and organizational bets now that hold up when the workload becomes real.
Balancing speed with quality. Ironsite ships 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, and to make sure the codebase, the systems, and the team all get stronger over time.
Being the technical partner to a technical leadership team. You'll partner with the leadership team on strategy, push back when they're wrong, and make sure the engineering org is set up to execute against whatever direction the company sets.