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 is the fastest way to run your GitHub Action workflows. We orchestrate your workflows over our fleet of bare-metal gaming CPUs with your build caches co-located right next to your CI jobs. All it takes is a one-line code change. Get started with Blacksmith https://docs.blacksmith.sh/introduction/quickstart
About Blacksmith
- We started by building infrastructure to run CI workloads really fast. Our first product helps companies run GitHub Actions substantially faster and cheaper by owning and operating our own global fleet of bare-metal machines rather than renting generic cloud VMs.
- Today, we orchestrate tens of millions of Firecracker VMs each month, running CI for 3,000+ companies and hit ~$10M in ARR in less than 2 years. We’ve already more than 5X’d revenue since the start of 2026.
- We operate thousands of bare-metal machines across multiple regions, regularly schedule 100k+ vCPUs concurrently, and run a petabyte-scale Ceph cluster that we manage ourselves.
- We’ve raised $58.5M from Seed to Series B, led by Google Ventures (GV) & Peak XV Capital, and we’re intentionally building a small, but exceptional team.
- Blacksmith was founded by a team with deep systems and scaling experience, including building search/ads infrastructure at Faire, and operating large distributed systems at Cockroach Labs. Our GTM is led by Jon Boyer, formerly Head of Sales at Zapier.
- We’re now extending the same CI infrastructure into a broader platform: running agent sandboxes at scale and building our own background coding agent on top of it.
Required skills
Other roles at Blacksmith
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.