Systems Engineer

About the company

Blacksmith builds infrastructure to run CI workloads at scale. Our first product accelerates GitHub Actions by operating a global fleet of bare-metal machines, avoiding generic cloud VMs. Today we orchestrate tens of millions of Firecracker VMs monthly for 3,000+ companies, reaching ~$10M ARR in under two years and tripling revenue since the start of 2026.

We manage thousands of bare-metal servers across multiple regions, schedule 100k+ concurrent vCPUs, and operate a petabyte-scale Ceph cluster in-house. Backed by $13.5M from Google Ventures (GV) and others, we’re intentionally assembling a small, exceptional team.

Founders bring deep systems and scaling experience from Faire, Cockroach Labs, and elsewhere; our GTM is led by Jon Boyer, former Head of Sales at Zapier. We’re now expanding our CI infrastructure into a broader platform for agent sandboxes and a background coding agent.

About you

• Have developed and scaled distributed systems and enjoy diagnosing performance and reliability issues across the filesystem, network, and storage stack.
• Are comfortable writing and debugging in C, C++, Go, Rust, or Zig, and care deeply about efficiency, correctness, and safety at the systems level.
• Are excited by self-hosting and managing infrastructure with build automation and configuration management tools (e.g., Ansible, Puppet, Chef).
• Have familiarity with distributed storage systems like Ceph or MinIO, or are eager to get hands-on with them.
• Have 2+ years of software development experience, ideally in performance-critical or distributed environments.
• Enjoy working in person 5 days a week in NYC with a small, tight-knit team.
• Thrive in the ambiguity of an early-stage startup and are energized by building from first principles.

Bonus

• You’ve dabbled in your own side hustles or start-up projects.
• You’re comfortable creating new processes and iterating on them quickly.

Benefits

• Medical, vision, and dental insurance.
• Competitive base salary plus equity.
• 401K match.
• Unlimited PTO.
• Annual company offsite.
• Early-exercise stock options.
• 12 weeks fully paid parental leave (US).