Build Ironsite’s recruiting function as its first talent hire, owning full-cycle recruiting across engineering, AI research, hardware, field operations, sales, and corporate roles. Develop sourcing, interviewing, offers, employer branding, ATS, reporting, and recruiting operations from scratch. Partner with executives and hiring managers on workforce planning, org design, candidate calibration, and closing highly competitive AI research and hardware candidates while scaling the company from approximately 40 to 200 employees.
About Ironsite
The Role
What You'll Own
What We're Looking For
What Success Looks Like
Location, Compensation, & Perks
Why This Role
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.
We're hiring our Head of People to build the recruiting function that will scale Ironsite from 40 people to 200 in the next eighteen months.
You are the first talent hire at the company. That means you own everything from full-cycle recruiting to sourcing strategy to interview design to offer close to onboarding, and you build the systems, tooling, and playbook that will let the next talent hires operate at scale when they arrive. Everything you build becomes the foundation the rest of the talent org runs on.
This is not a role for someone who wants to inherit a mature ATS setup and manage a pipeline. It's a role for someone who has recruited for the hardest roles in tech, at pace, at a fast-growing startup, and wants to do it again from the ground up in a company that's going after multiple frontier categories at once.
The two hardest hiring markets you'll operate in are AI research and hardware engineering. Both are competitive with every top lab and hardware company in the industry. If those are the markets you've hunted in before and won, this role is built for you.
Full-cycle recruiting across every function.
- Own the full recruiting cycle for every open role at Ironsite, from sourcing through offer close, including engineering, AI research, hardware, field operations, sales, and general and administrative roles.
- Run the top-of-funnel motion yourself. Direct sourcing on LinkedIn, GitHub, arXiv, conference lists, and everywhere else the best talent lives.
- Manage the full candidate experience from first outreach through onboarding, and hold Ironsite to a quality bar that reflects how seriously we take this work.
Build the recruiting playbook.
- Design and document the interview processes for each function, in partnership with hiring managers, that reliably identify signal without wasting anyone's time.
- Build the sourcing playbook, outreach cadences, message templates, and channel strategy that let Ironsite compete with the top companies in every market we recruit in.
- Establish the offer strategy, comp philosophy, equity guidance, and negotiation playbook that make offers land and close.
- Set up the ATS, referral program, employer brand collateral, and every other operational system the recruiting function needs to run at scale.
Recruit AI and hardware talent at a level competitive with top labs and hardware companies.
- Build direct relationships with the AI research community. Know which researchers are ready to move, which are worth pursuing, and how to bring them into a serious conversation with Ironsite.
- Build direct relationships with the hardware community. Know the wearables, camera, and consumer electronics ecosystems well enough to source and close candidates from Apple, Fitbit, Oura, Whoop, GoPro, Meta, Google, and their equivalents.
- Partner with our CTO, Chief Science Officer, Chief Operations Officer, and the rest of company leadership on messaging, positioning, and closing strategy for these hires specifically. These are the hardest roles to fill and the highest-leverage.
Partner across the company.
- Serve as the trusted talent partner to every hiring manager. You'll help them define what they're actually looking for, structure the interview loop, and make the calls that get the right hire done.
- Bring calibration and rigor to every hiring conversation. Push back when a bar is being lowered, and push forward when a great candidate is on the edge.
- Partner with the founding team on workforce planning, hiring priorities, and org design as the company scales.
Set up the operational foundation.
- Choose and set up the ATS, sourcing tools, scheduling systems, and other tooling the recruiting function needs.
- Establish the reporting and metrics that give the founding team real-time visibility into pipeline health, funnel conversion, and time-to-hire.
- Build the first version of Ironsite's employer brand externally, in partnership with marketing.
- Lay the groundwork for eventually hiring additional recruiters and building out the People and Talent function.
What We're Looking For
Required
- 6-10+ years of full-cycle recruiting experience at fast-growing technology companies, with a track record of hiring for hard-to-fill technical roles at pace.
- Deep experience recruiting AI research talent (research scientists, ML engineers, applied researchers) against top labs. You know the community, the sourcing channels, the compensation dynamics, and how to close.
- Deep experience recruiting hardware engineering talent (firmware, electrical, mechanical, product design) against top consumer electronics and wearables companies. You know the ecosystem, the specialties, and how to compete for the best.
- Prior experience as a founding or early recruiting hire at a startup that scaled from 30-40 people to 150+. You've built the function before, not just executed within one.
- Full-cycle ownership from sourcing through close. You are not a coordinator, and you are not a manager who has stopped recruiting yourself. You still hunt.
- Bias to action. You'd rather send the cold outreach than wait for it to feel perfect, and you'd rather push a hiring manager to make a decision than let a candidate go stale.
- Genuine intellectual honesty about candidates and process. You know when a candidate is a real fit and when they're not, and you don't tell hiring managers stories about pipeline that isn't there.
- High autonomy and sound judgment. You'll be the only person doing this job for a while, and you'll be making calls that shape the entire company.
- Comfort with ambiguity. You don't need an established process to be productive. You build the process as you go.
Strongly preferred
- Experience recruiting for engineering roles at wearables, camera, or consumer electronics companies (Fitbit, Oura, Whoop, GoPro, Sesame, Apple, Meta, Snap, or similar).
- Experience recruiting for AI research roles at frontier labs, applied AI startups, or research-heavy product companies.
- Experience setting up and administering modern ATS systems (Ashby, Greenhouse, Lever, or similar) from scratch.
- Experience building and closing offers in the $200k+ base range, including complex equity negotiations at Series A / B stage.
- Experience partnering with founders and executives on workforce planning and hiring strategy.
Nice to have
- Experience recruiting for construction, industrial, or physical AI roles.
- Experience with immigration and visa processes (H-1B, O-1, TN, green card sponsorship) for technical hires.
- Familiarity with modern sourcing tools (Gem, Ashby, HireEZ, or similar).
- Experience building employer brand and content strategy.
- Prior in-house recruiting experience (not just agency), so you understand the internal dynamics of hiring at velocity.
What Success Looks Like
- First 30 days. You know Ironsite cold. Product, roadmap, culture, current team, and every open role. You've met every hiring manager, understood their priorities, and have a clear point of view on where the recruiting bottlenecks are. The ATS is set up, the sourcing motion is running, and hiring managers know how to partner with you.
- First 60 days. You've closed your first hires across engineering, hardware, or AI research.
- First 3 months. Ironsite is consistently closing candidates across every open role. You've built the recruiting playbook that scales, and pipeline metrics are trusted and current. You've closed a hire in AI research or hardware that changes the trajectory of the company.
- First 6 months. You're the internal authority on talent at Ironsite. The recruiting function is running smoothly across every hiring priority, we've grown from 35 to 100+ people because of your work, and you're beginning to lay the foundation for the People and Talent org that will scale beyond you.
Location, Compensation, & Perks
- San Francisco Bay Area (on-site)
- Base salary: $175k-$225k per year, commensurate with experience
- Meaningful founding-team equity. The person who builds the recruiting function should own real upside.
- 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.
Every category-defining company had one recruiter who was the reason they could actually hire the people it took to build. Not because they had the fanciest ATS, but because they hunted, they built relationships in hard markets, and they closed the candidates other companies couldn't.
Ironsite is at that moment. We have the product, the customers, the funding, and the founding team. What we need is the recruiter who is going to help us build the team it takes to become a category-defining company across AI, hardware, field operations, and go-to-market simultaneously.
If you've hunted at a company where the recruiting playbook worked, and you're ready to go back to zero and build one for a company going after multiple frontier categories at once, we want to talk.
CompensationThe base pay range for this role is $175,000 – $225,000 per year.
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