gem
VP of Platform Engineering
Ironsite
San Francisco, USA
Full-time
Senior Level
Onsite
USD 300000-375000 yearly
Discovered 1 months ago
Full Job Posting
What You'Ll Own
- 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.
Technical Challenges You'Ll Own
- 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.
What We'Re Looking For
- 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.
Preferred Qualifications
- 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.
- 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.
What Success Looks Like
- First 30 days. You know the engineering org, the codebase, the roadmap, and every engineer on the team. You've built strong relationships with the management team. You've identified the top three areas where the org needs to strengthen fastest: architecture, team composition, hiring pipeline, delivery discipline, or something else. You've reviewed enough code across teams to have real opinions on the state of the codebase.
- First 3 months. The engineering org is shipping with clear delivery discipline. Code review standards are raising the bar across every team. You've made or scoped the first key leadership hires, and the leads underneath you are visibly better because of your mentorship. You're contributing code weekly on real problems. The architectural direction you're driving is visible in what's shipping.
- First 6 months. You're the internal authority on how Ironsite's engineering org operates. The team has scaled meaningfully, the technical bar has risen, and Ironsite ships faster and better than we did a year ago. When we scale from thousands of devices to hundreds of thousands, we do it because the org you built, the technical direction you drove, and the culture you established hold up.
• San Francisco Bay Area (on-site)
- Base salary: $300k-$375k per year, commensurate with experience
- Meaningful founding-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
About Ironsite
Software & SaaS34 employeesFounded 2024
Construction technology company building wearable cameras and AI models that turn jobsite footage into reports for leaders.
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