About the role
What we're looking for
We need a Staff-level systems engineer with deep experience building and operating large-scale distributed infrastructure who has personally architected and delivered critical systems at prestigious organizations. You should be comfortable working at the kernel level with bare-metal machines, virtualization technologies, and distributed storage, and have a track record of materially changing the technical direction and trajectory of engineering teams as a senior IC. Bonus points if you've been early at a high-growth startup that scaled to industry recognition or have publications, conference talks, or patents in systems engineering.
What you'll do
- Own and drive the architectural direction for critical infrastructure platforms that orchestrate tens of millions of Firecracker VMs monthly across a global fleet of bare-metal machines
- Take ownership of production outcomes including reliability, performance, and operational excellence as Blacksmith triples compute capacity
- Work closely with the technical co-founders to translate business and product strategy into long-term technical roadmaps and execution plans
- Design and build systems at the kernel and filesystems level using eBPF, cgroups, namespaces, and low-level I/O tuning to optimize performance at petabyte scale
- Lead complex infrastructure initiatives from problem definition through delivery in ambiguous problem spaces where both the problem and solution need to be defined
- Mentor senior engineers and act as a force multiplier, raising engineering standards across the team and shaping how Blacksmith grows as a platform
About Blacksmith
Blacksmith helps companies run their continuous integration (CI) up to twice as fast, at half the cost. We do this by running their CI on high performance gaming CPUs.
- Engineering productivity is often marred by slow CI that grows quadratically with the size of the engineering organization.
- On top of this, companies pay high markups to run CI on the hyperscalers.
- Consequently, companies have to run their CI on spot instances to keep costs in check. Since spot instances can get pre-empted at any point, running CI reliably on them requires significant engineering investment.
Blacksmith offers CI compute that is more performant, cheaper, and reliable. With Blacksmith, companies do not have to think about CI as they scale.
We are starting with GitHub Actions - today's most popular and fastest-growing CI system. With a one-line change, companies can run their CI up to twice as fast on our high-performance hardware. In addition to this, Blacksmith provides colocated warm caches along with optimizations for common CI workloads (like building and pushing Docker images).
Aayush, JP and Aditya have gained deep systems and product knowledge from their time at Cockroach Labs and Faire respectively. Both these companies, with several hundred engineers, were spending in the order of millions of dollars on their CI. Yet they were riddled with slow CI and actively seeking out cheaper and faster alternatives. Blacksmith offers exactly this alternative, at a time where being lean is table-stakes for most companies.
Required skills
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Job details
Salary
$280,000 - $380,000
Location
New York City, United States
Experience
8+ years
Funding
Total raised
$14.5M
Last stage
Series A
Investors
What happens next.
No applications, no recruiter spam. Just the intro.
Confirm the fit
A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.
I pitch you to the company
I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.
A meeting lands on your calendar
If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.