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 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
$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.