About the role

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 more than tripled 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 $13.5M across Seed and Series A, led by Google Ventures (GV), 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.

The Staff Systems Engineer at Blacksmith

We are looking for a Staff Engineer to help set the technical direction for our core infrastructure, critical to the Blacksmith product. This role operates at the organization level, owning architecture, solving complex systems problems, and driving initiatives that shape how Blacksmith grows, performs, and remains reliable.

You will be one of the key technical authorities and a force multiplier at Blacksmith. You’ll raise engineering standards across the team, mentor senior talent and own production outcomes.

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.

Staff Systems Engineer

About the role

About Blacksmith

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