MTS - Research Scientist

The posting, as Ironsite Ai wrote it

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 a Research Scientist to help build the vision-language models that turn Ironsite's data into the intelligence layer we're building.

You'll work alongside our Chief Science Officer and the rest of the research team on the training, benchmarking, and deployment of state-of-the-art VLMs that can interpret the complexity of a real construction site. Your models will run on data no other lab has, and they'll ship to jobsites where they actually change how things get built.

Ironsite operates one of the most distinctive research environments in AI today. Our dataset is proprietary, growing by thousands of hours per day, expert-labeled, and structured around a taxonomy b
[…]
ys. You know our data, our benchmarks, and our production models cold. You've completed your first end-to-end experiment and shipped at least one meaningful improvement to a model in production.

• First 3 months. You've owned a research initiative from problem definition through deployment, and your work has visibly moved model performance on a problem that matters.
• First 6 months. You're a full contributor to the research team's roadmap and a trusted collaborator across the company. You've grown from executing on research problems to helping shape which ones we take on next.

Location, Compensation, & Perks

• San Francisco Bay Area (on-site)
• Base salary: $175k-$275k per year, commensurate with experience
• Significant early-stage equity
• Full benefits including health, dental, vision, and 401(k) with 6% match
• Access to dedicated GPU compute resources for research and experimentation
• Daily catered lunch
• Office in San Francisco, next to Oracle Park and the Caltrain

Final compensation is determined by experience, location, and level.

Why You'll Love Working at Ironsite

• Foundational impact. Solve fundamental AI problems to transform one of the world's largest and least-digitized industries. Your models ship to real jobsites, not just papers.
• Growth opportunity. We're at the stage where every researcher's work materially shapes the company. You'll get scope early, and the growth trajectory is defined by how much impact you're willing to have.
• Dream dataset. Exclusive access to a massive, proprietary, and continuously growing corpus of egocentric jobsite video from hundreds of devices deployed on active construction sites. A moat that enables frontier research.
• World-class team. Learn from and collaborate with a small, elite team of researchers and engineers who have shipped cutting-edge AI products at companies like DeepMind, Etched, Meta, Apple, and NVIDIA.

Compensation
The base pay range for this role is $175,000 – $275,000 per year.