Design Engineer (Member of Technical Staff)
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 Senior 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
- 5-8 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.
Compensation & Perks
- San Francisco Bay Area (on-site)
- Competitive salary and equity package
- Full benefits including health, dental, vision, and 401 (k) + 6% match
- Daily catered breakfast and lunch