---
title: 'Head of Field Applications at Ironsite AI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-field-applications-ironsite-ai-san-francisco-vrtmg9j8kkvq'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-05'
---

# Head of Field Applications at Ironsite AI

- **Company:** Ironsite AI
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $200k–$300k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-09-04
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-05
- **Apply:** https://jobs.gem.com/ironsite-ai/am9icG9zdDrTFlcIremx-txqWKWwbXl-

## 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

As Head of Field Applications, you'll lead the engineering organization that owns everything a crafts worker or superintendent touches. That means two teams: our forward deployed software engineers, who embed with customers on active jobsites and build what each project needs to get value from Ironsite, and our mobile team, who build the craft worker experience and the software that provisions, manages, and monitors thousands of devices in the field.

This is an engineering leadership role. You'll hire and manage engineers, set technical direction for mobile and device management, decide what gets built as a one-off for a customer versus productized for everyone, and be accountable for the software that runs at 5:30 AM in a laydown yard with no Wi-Fi. You'll report to the CTO and partner closely with hardware, platform, and AI leads.

We've assembled an incredibly diverse team that hasn't existed in construction before. This includes hardware engineers from Oculus, Fitbit, and Apple; research engineers from DeepMind, Etched, and Anduril; software engineers from Meta, NVIDIA, and Google; and construction veterans from Turner, DPR Construction, and Pacific Structures. Your job is to build the engineering team that puts all of that in front of the people on the jobsite.

## What You'll Do

- 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.

## What We're Looking For

- 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.

## Preferred Qualifications

- 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.

Location, Compensation, & Perks

- San Francisco Bay Area (on-site)
- Base salary: $200k-$300k per year, commensurate with experience
- Meaningful early-stage team equity.
- Full benefits including health, dental, vision, and 401(k) with 6% match
- Daily catered breakfast and lunch
- Office in San Francisco, next to Oracle Park and the Caltrain

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

## About Ironsite AI

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Ironsite AI equips construction workers with wearable cameras and AI vision models to drive on-site productivity, safety, and training.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Pre-Seed)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States (with an office in New York)
- **Founded**: 2025
- **Founders**: Charu Thomas (Co-Founder, CTO), Okie Jon Williams (Head of Hardware Research), and others

## Core Business
- Primary industry: Construction Technology (Contech) / Data Infrastructure and Analytics
- Target customers: General contractors, construction superintendents, and self-performing contractors (B2B Enterprise)
- Mission statement: To use spatial intelligence and AI to help humans do what they do best: build.

## Products & Services
- **Ironsite Wearable Camera & Platform**: A ruggedized wearable hard hat-mounted camera that captures real-time job site activity. The platform applies AI vision-language models (VLMs) to analyze worker behavior, identify safety hazards, track productivity metrics, and optimize labor allocation. The offering includes a mobile web experience for workers to track achievements, attendance, and rewards, along with a cloud dashboard for superintendents and project managers.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly available (Pre-Seed stage)
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding of a Pre-Seed round (raised in 2024) from Transpose Platform. Employee headcount of 63 (as of mid-2026).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Transpose Platform (lead investor). The company has also hired talent from major construction firms like Brasfield & Gorrie and DPR Construction, indicating strong industry partnerships or recruitment.
- **Growth Signals**: Rapid headcount growth (+2.3% monthly). The company is actively scaling from roughly 40 to 200 employees and has plans to scale device deployment from thousands to hundreds of thousands of units. The company has already built a strong technical team with alumni from companies like Amazon, NVIDIA, and Etched.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Hardware + Software Moats**: By building its own ruggedized wearable cameras, Ironsite controls the data capture pipeline, creating a unique dataset for training its vision models.
- **Vertical-Specific AI**: The company focuses exclusively on construction, allowing its VLMs to develop deep, expert-level perception of construction workflows, materials, and safety hazards—a niche that general-purpose computer vision companies cannot easily replicate.
- **On-Site Embedding**: Engineers and product teams regularly embed on active jobsites, creating a tight feedback loop between field operations and product development, which is a rare and powerful moat in the construction industry.

## Strategic Focus
- **Scaling Hardware & AI**: The primary focus is scaling manufacturing of wearable devices and advancing their vision-language models to handle long-context video reasoning and low-connectivity environments.
- **Enterprise Integration**: Building deep integrations with existing construction management platforms (Procore, Autodesk, Trimble), payroll, and ERP systems to become a seamless part of a contractor’s tech stack.
- **Hiring for Scale**: Aggressively hiring across engineering, AI research, hardware, and operations to grow from ~40 to 200 employees.

## Why Work Here
- **High-Impact AI at the Edge**: The chance to work on technically challenging problems—petabyte-scale video ingestion, on-device AI inference, and real-time multimodal data processing—from day one.
- **Hybrid Work Model**: The company uses a hybrid workplace, with employees engaging in a combination of remote and on-site work. On-site time is expected, particularly for roles involving hardware or on-site construction collaboration.
- **Culture of Shared Ambition**: Described as “an incredibly ambitious group of construction superintendents, AI researchers, hardware tinkerers, and people from all walks of life.” There is a strong emphasis on hands-on, cross-functional collaboration.
- **Fast-Growth Environment**: The company is in a high-growth phase (doubling headcount), offering significant ownership, career growth, and impact for early hires.
- **Meaningful Mission**: The work directly improves the safety, efficiency, and quality of life for construction workers, a large and often underserved workforce.

## Sources
1. [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/ironsite)
2. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/ironsite)
3. [indexed.vc](https://indexed.vc/companies/ironsite-ai)
4. [jobs.gem.com](https://jobs.gem.com/ironsite-ai)
5. [builtin.com - Jobs](https://builtin.com/company/ironsite/jobs)

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