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.
What you’ll own
Product Positioning & Messaging
Launches & GTM
Sales Enablement & Collateral
Content & Thought Leadership
Clarity : You can make a deeply technical concept understandable without dumbing it down.
Taste : You care about quality, all the way from slide design to headline phrasing.
Curiosity : You ask good questions and listen deeply to customers.
Bias to action : You ship fast, iterate, and learn.
Collaboration : You work fluidly with founders, engineers, and designers.
Technical empathy : You don’t need to code, but you understand how developers think.
Medical, Vision, and Dental insurance.
Competitive base + equity.
Unlimited PTO.
Annual offsite.
Early-exercise stock options
12 weeks fully paid parental leave (US)
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.
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.
Salary
$180,000 - $250,000
Location
SF, NYC
Experience
5+ years
Total raised
$14.5M
Last stage
Series A
Investors
No applications, no recruiter spam. Just the intro.
A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.
I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.
If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.