Head of Capacity

About the Role

Blacksmith's infrastructure footprint is growing rapidly. Every quarter, we make decisions around servers, storage, networking, datacenter capacity, power, and geographic expansion. As demand for software validation grows, ensuring that capacity is available when and where we need it becomes increasingly important. We're looking for someone to own this problem. You'll work directly with the founders and infrastructure team to forecast demand, plan capacity growth, manage supplier relationships, and ensure Blacksmith can scale ahead of customer demand. Your job is simple to describe but difficult to execute: Make sure Blacksmith never runs out of capacity.

Responsibilities

• Own capacity planning across compute, storage, networking, and datacenter infrastructure.
• Build forecasting models for infrastructure demand and growth.
• Partner with engineering to understand future workload requirements.
• Develop deployment plans across regions and datacenter partners.
• Manage relationships with hardware vendors, datacenter providers, and infrastructure suppliers.
• Lead hardware procurement and infrastructure expansion efforts.
• Evaluate new suppliers, hardware platforms, and deployment opportunities.
• Track utilization and ensure infrastructure investments are deployed efficiently.
• Build processes and systems that allow Blacksmith to scale from thousands of servers to many times that number.

Requirements

• Experience operating large-scale infrastructure, cloud, hosting, networking, or datacenter environments.
• Experience with capacity planning, forecasting, or infrastructure operations.
• Ability to balance long-term planning with day-to-day operational realities.
• Highly analytical and comfortable making decisions under uncertainty.
• Strong vendor management and negotiation skills.
• Ability to work effectively with both technical and business stakeholders.
• Passion for solving operational problems at scale.
• Willingness to work closely with founders on company-critical infrastructure decisions.
• Availability to work in person 5 days a week in SF/NYC.

Qualifications

Bonus qualifications include:

• Experience at a hyperscaler, cloud provider, hosting company, CDN, or infrastructure startup.
• Experience procuring servers, networking equipment, storage, or datacenter capacity.
• Experience managing infrastructure supply chains.
• Experience with power planning, datacenter operations, or colocation providers.
• Experience scaling infrastructure through periods of hypergrowth.

What Success Looks Like

Within your first year:

• Blacksmith has a clear, data-driven capacity planning process.
• Infrastructure growth is forecasted quarters ahead of demand.
• Hardware procurement and deployment timelines are predictable.
• Vendor and datacenter relationships are strong and scalable.
• Leadership has visibility into future capacity constraints before they become operational issues.
• Blacksmith can confidently scale infrastructure without becoming constrained by supply, deployment timelines, or planning failures.

Benefits

• Medical, Vision, and Dental insurance.
• Competitive base + equity.
• 401K match.
• Unlimited PTO.
• Annual offsite.
• Early-exercise stock options.
• 12 weeks fully paid parental leave (US).