About the role
What we're looking for:
We need someone with 5+ years of experience building and scaling low-level distributed systems who has delivered meaningful, zero-to-one infrastructure at a prestigious organization. You should be comfortable working in a fast-paced, early-stage startup environment (in-person 5 days/week in NYC) and have a track record of materially impacting the trajectory of engineering teams and infrastructure at scale. Bonus points if you've founded or been early at a startup that grew into a recognized leader, or have publications, patents, or conference talks to your name.
What you'll do:
- Design, build, and scale distributed systems infrastructure that orchestrates tens of millions of Firecracker VMs monthly across a global fleet of bare-metal machines
- Take ownership of critical systems challenges as compute capacity triples — including storage, networking, and scheduling at petabyte scale
- Work closely with the technical co-founders and a small, elite engineering team to solve hard infrastructure problems from first principles
- Develop and optimize performance-critical systems using low-level languages (Go, Rust, C/C++) with a focus on efficiency, correctness, and reliability
- Lead infrastructure projects end-to-end — from design through production — that directly enable large enterprise customers and new product capabilities (agent sandboxes, background coding agents)
- Leverage and orchestrate AI coding agents to accelerate development velocity and push the boundaries of what's possible with autonomous engineering workflows
Key signals we're looking for:
- Built and owned something significant at a prestigious, recognizable organization — not just managed existing infrastructure
- Experience with distributed storage systems (e.g., Ceph, MinIO) or similar large-scale data systems
- Strong IC who can change the direction and trajectory of the engineering team around them
- Comfortable with ambiguity and building from scratch in a startup that's scaling rapidly (~$10M ARR in <2 years)
- Proficient with modern AI-assisted development workflows and agent orchestration
This is NOT a DevOps/SRE role. We need someone who has built systems themselves, not just managed hyperscale infrastructure.
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
$200,000 - $300,000
Location
New York, United States
Experience
5+ 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.