Superintendent, Construction

Residential Construction Superintendent

Character Companies, Inc. Alexandria, VA $85,000 to $110,000 base plus profit share

Character Companies builds custom and spec homes from $1M to $3M on infill lots in Alexandria, Arlington, and Fairfax County, the kind of neighborhoods where the house going up next door has been there for eighty years and everybody on the street is watching. We run three defined product lines, Classic, Signature, and Legacy, so pricing and specs are settled before we break ground instead of getting negotiated at the client's expense halfway through framing.

Every house is built to a written standard covering all nine phases, from footing depth and rebar placement to tight miters and consistent reveals in the trim. When something is wrong, we tear it out and do it again, because our name is on the front of the company and a family is going to live in that house for twenty years.

You report to our General Manager and own the field on a focused set of active homes. That means what gets built, in what order, and to what standard. You are the person who makes sure the house that gets built is the house that was drawn, and that it gets delivered on time.

You start on site, not at a desk, walking every active job on the standard sequence: perimeter and E&S check, then in at the top floor and down through every room, with a hard look at what the last trade left behind. What you find gets logged in Job Tread the same day with a photo, an owner, and a due date, and you chase it closed on your timeline instead of waiting for the sub to wander back through.

Between walks you are looking two, four, and six weeks out: trades booked, long lead items landing on time, inspections scheduled, and nothing on the critical path quietly slipping. At every phase gate you inspect against our written standard before anything gets covered, and you stop the work when it does not meet it. You close the week by walking the GM through where each house sits against its schedule, what is coming, and what you are doing to protect an on time delivery.

You get your scorecard on day one and we review it weekly. No mystery and no moving goalposts.

1. Site walks on the standard sequence, every job, every set day. Measured by walk completion rate, and defects caught at a phase gate instead of s is what keeps quality problems from ever reaching a client.

2. Same day logging in Job Tread with a photo, an owner, and a due date. Measured by percent logged same day and percent closed by due date. Makes the field visible so we run on systems instead of heroics.

3. Phase gate inspections against the written standard before anything gets covered. Measured by gates signed off before cover, and open items at final walk. Work caught before drywall costs a fraction of the same work caught after. Direct margin protection.

4. Rolling two, four, and six week look ahead on every assigned home. Measured by milestone dates hit and days in construction against baseline. On time delivery is what the client is buying, and cycle time drives how many homes we turn.

5. Verifying work in place before it is paid and rejecting unauthorized field changes. Measured by rework dollars as a percent of job cost. Every dollar spent building something twice comes out of the margin that funds the next lot.

We use GWC. Before we hire anyone, we ask whether they Get it, Want it, and have the Capacity to do it. All three have to be a yes, and we would rather find out now than six months in.

Get it. You can read a full plan set and find the conflict before it gets framed. You understand why sequencing exists and when it is safe to deviate. You know luxury tolerances are a different standard than production, and you can explain the difference in specifics.

Want it. You want to be in the field, and you want to stay there. This is a builder's seat, not a step toward a desk.

Capacity. You have the time to cover every job daily, the discipline to document the same day, and the spine to make a sub tear out and redo work without torching the relationship.

Three values run this company. They are not wall art. We hire against them, we review against them, and when someone does not fit them we deal with it.

Fail Forward. This business was not built on a handful of wins. It was built on a mountain of failures we learned from. When the framing is off you do not tear down the house, you adjust, course correct, and keep building. What we ask is that you own the mistake, solve your way back on track, and keep your head up while you do it.

Nobody here gets punished for a problem they surfaced early. People do get held to what they did next.

Fuel the Vibe. Culture is not built in meetings. It is built in how you show up on a Tuesday morning when the job is behind and it is raining. Your attitude works like a level: if you are true and steady, the whole team builds straight, and if…