The posting
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 are 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. The systems we're building will be the operating system for how the physical world gets built. We see a future 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 start with the same foundation.
The Role
We're hiring an engineer to own field infrastructure: the networks and edge compute that keep thousands of wearable cameras recording, charging, and uploading on some of the largest jobsites in the country. Power is temporary, connectivity is satellite or cellular, and the site looks different every week.
Every shift's footage needs to reach the cloud before the next morning's report. You'll own the path from the device to our cloud, starting with the network and compute in the on-site rack we're building, a ruggedized telecom-style unit with edge compute, industrial switching, satellite backhaul, power, battery and charging drawers, and I/O to site equipment. You'll write the software that runs on it, ship the updates that reach it, and build the network monitoring that catches problems early.
Some of the Things You’ll Work On
Jobsite networks. Satellite and cellular backhaul with failover, Wi-Fi across trailers, laydown yards, and active floors, and zero-trust access back to the cloud, designed and stood up at each site. Edge workloads. Video compression and pre-processing, upload scheduling, and the services that move a site's footage, written in Rust, C++, and C to run on tight power and bandwidth. The on-site rack. The compute and network side of our rack, built with the hardware and firmware teams. Industrial switching, backhaul, power and battery telemetry, and digital, analog, and PWM I/O to peripherals. Edge fleet. Reproducible NixOS images, staged rollouts with canaries and rollback, and auto-update that works when a site has been offline for days. Device-to-cloud ingestion. A full shift of video uploaded overnight over constrained, metered links, with resumable transfers, bandwidth shaping, and on-site buffering so nothing gets dropped. Site launches. A repeatable playbook for bringing up a new jobsite, from hardware kits and charging to network bring-up and remote checks before the first shift. Network observability. Per-site uplink latency, loss, and throughput, backhaul failovers, Wi-Fi and RF health, switch and port telemetry, and upload rates, with alerts within minutes when a link drops or saturates. You'll also work with hardware and platform on fleet-wide device monitoring. Inventory and lifecycle. Every camera, router, and edge box tracked from shipping to decommission, with firmware, OS, kernels, and certificates kept current.
Technical Challenges You'll Solve
Offline is the default. Sites drop connectivity for hours or days at a time. Updates, telemetry, and uploads have to queue, resume, and catch up on their own. Sites change every week. Steel, concrete, and new floors break RF plans as the building goes up, so networks and tooling have to adapt with the site. No IT on site. Nobody on site can debug a network for us. If it can't be fixed remotely, it's a truck roll and a lost day of footage. A fixed power budget. The rack runs on site power and batteries, so compression and pre-processing have to fit a fixed power and thermal envelope and still keep up with the fleet. Fleet scale. Thousands of devices across dozens of sites in seven-plus states, all reproducible, patched, and accounted for.
What We're Looking For
Strong programming in Rust, C++, or C, with production software on resource-constrained Linux (video pipelines, networking, long-running services). Hands-on experience designing and running networks in difficult environments, including WAN/LAN, Wi-Fi planning, satellite and cellular backhaul, VPNs and overlay networks, and failover. Deep Linux and systems skills: building OS images, debugging kernel and driver issues, and working within storage, power, and thermal limits on edge hardware. Infrastructure as code (Nix, Terraform/OpenTofu, Ansible, or similar); every box rebuildable from the repo. Experience running device fleets with staged rollouts, remote management, monitoring, and alerting. Willing to travel to jobsites to bring up networks and debug in person. Typically 4+ years in infrastructure, networking, or fleet operations; CS, EE, or related degree, or equivalent experience.
Preferred Qualifications
NixOS or other reproducible, declarative systems in production. IoT, industrial, or OT networking: PoE, ruggedized gear, and harsh RF environments. High-throughput transfer over unreliable links: store-and-forward, resumable and delta sync. Video encoding and processing: hardware encoders, FFmpeg or GStreamer pipelines. Hardware interfaces (GPIO, ADC, PWM, serial and fieldbus) and working closely with EE and firmware teams. Network monitoring and telemetry across distributed sites: SNMP or streaming telemetry, flow data, synthetic probes, and Prometheus-compatible metrics with Grafana. Security fundamentals for edge fleets: device identity, certificate rotation, and secure remote access. Field deployments in construction, energy, telecom, or similar industries.
Location, Compensation, & Perks
San Francisco Bay Area (on-site) Base salary: $225k-$275k per year, commensurate with experience Meaningful early-stage team equity. Ability to purchase xPU or devices for development Full benefits including health, dental, vision, and 401(k) with 6% match Daily catered lunch Office in San Francisco, next to Oracle Park and the Caltrain
Final compensation is determined by experience, location, and level.
