---
title: 'MTS - Design Engineer at Ironsite AI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/mts-design-engineer-ironsite-ai-san-francisco-9w4haafs64x7'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-11'
---

# MTS - Design Engineer at Ironsite AI

- **Company:** Ironsite AI
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $150k–$225k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-04-06
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-11
- **Apply:** https://jobs.gem.com/ironsite-ai/am9icG9zdDpi3JpAA9mMr5Owrwo3PARr

## 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 an exceptional Design Engineer to shape how Ironsite looks, feels, and works in the hands of every person who uses it.

You'll build across the surfaces our customers, our workforce, and our internal team live in every day. The dashboards project leaders open at 5 AM. The mobile experience craft workers carry in their pocket. The internal tools our labeling team uses every night. Ironsite's product surface is broad, and the details matter across every one of them.

This role sits at the intersection of design and engineering, and the person we're hiring cares about both. You take real ownership of what you ship, move fast without cutting corners on craft, and hold a bar for polish that most companies say they want and few actually reach.

## What You'll Do

- Build and evolve the Ironsite product surface across customer, workforce, and internal products. You'll ship across the full breadth of what Ironsite exposes to the world, not just one team's surface.
- Own the design system. Build and maintain the design system that keeps Ironsite feeling coherent as we add surfaces, teams, and use cases. This is the foundation that lets us move faster over time, not slower.
- Design and implement interactions that feel considered. From micro-interactions to full end-to-end user flows, you'll bring the level of polish that turns a functional product into one people actually love using.
- Prototype and ship new features end-to-end. You'll be trusted to take an idea from Figma to production, making the calls on both sides of the design/engineering line without needing to hand it off.
- Raise the bar across the company. You'll partner closely with design, product, and engineering to set and enforce a quality bar the whole team aspires to. The way you build is the way the rest of the team will build.

## What We’re Looking For

- 3-6 years of experience in design engineering or frontend-heavy product roles, with a track record of shipping work you're proud of.
- Deep expertise across React, TypeScript, HTML, CSS, and modern JavaScript. You've made real judgment calls about when to reach for a framework, when to build from primitives, and when to keep it simple.
- High proficiency in Figma and modern design workflows. You think in components, systems, and design tokens, not just screens.
- Real product taste. You can look at an interface and articulate what's working, what isn't, and why, and you can execute on the fix yourself.
- Bias toward building. You'd rather ship a working prototype than argue about a mockup, and you use fast iteration as a substitute for lengthy debate.
- Comfort with tools like Claude Code, Lottie, and WebGL, or the appetite to become comfortable with them quickly.
- Startup experience, especially at a stage where design and engineering weren't clearly separated and the ambiguity was the point.

## Requirements

- Portfolio of shipped work. We want to see what you've made, not what you've mocked up.
- Data visualization experience, especially for products where the data itself is the story.
- Motion design chops. Interactions that feel alive, not just functional.
- Experience shipping design systems that have been adopted across multiple product surfaces or teams.

Location, Compensation, & Perks

- San Francisco Bay Area (on-site)
- Base salary: $150k-$225k 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)

## Other roles at Ironsite AI

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- [Head of Platform](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-platform-ironsite-ai-san-francisco-nesp5wd3vm6p) — San Francisco, CA
- [Prototyping Lab Technician, Wearables](https://feeny.ai/job/prototyping-lab-technician-wearables-ironsite-ai-san-francisco-944mbs575gb6) — San Francisco, CA
- [VP of Finance](https://feeny.ai/job/vp-of-finance-ironsite-ai-san-francisco-2xhykya0bgz3) — San Francisco, CA
- [Head of Talent](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-talent-ironsite-ai-san-francisco-nq7e29kr6yfd) — San Francisco, CA
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