Senior Systems Engineer

Company: Blacksmith
Location: New York NY (in office 5 days per week)
Compensation: $200000 - $300000 competitive equity
Employment Type: Full-time
Visa Sponsorship: Visa transfers only (must already hold a transferable work visa)

Blacksmith started by making CI workloads run much faster: its first product runs GitHub Actions substantially faster and cheaper on its own global fleet of bare-metal machines instead of rented cloud VMs. It now orchestrates tens of millions of Firecracker VMs a month for 3000 companies schedules 100k vCPUs concurrently and runs a petabyte-scale Ceph cluster it manages itself.

Blacksmith reached about $10M ARR in under two years has grown revenue more than 5x since the start of 2026 and has raised $58.5M through its Series B.

Blacksmith is looking for an engineer with 5 years building and scaling low-level distributed systems who has delivered meaningful zero-to-one infrastructure at a prestigious organization. You will work with the technical co-founders and a small elite team on hard infrastructure problems from first principles in person in New York. This is not a DevOps/SRE role: Blacksmith needs someone who has built systems not just managed hyperscale infrastructure.

• Design build and scale infrastructure that orchestrates tens of millions of Firecracker VMs a month across a global bare-metal fleet.
• Own critical storage networking and scheduling challenges at petabyte scale as compute capacity triples.
• Develop performance-critical systems in Go Rust or C/C with a focus on efficiency correctness and reliability.
• Lead infrastructure projects end to end that enable enterprise customers and new products such as agent sandboxes and background coding agents.
• Use and orchestrate AI coding agents to accelerate development.

• 5 years building and scaling low-level distributed systems
• Something significant you built and owned at a recognizable organization
• Experience with distributed storage (such as Ceph or MinIO) or similar large-scale data systems
• A strong IC who changes the trajectory of the team around them
• Comfort building from scratch in a fast-scaling startup
• Proficiency with AI-assisted development and agent orchestration

• Founded or was early at a startup that became a recognized leader
• Publications patents or conference talks

Go Rust C C Zig Firecracker Ceph Linux Ansible bare-metal infrastructure distributed systems AI coding agents

REVENUE: 14% of first-year salary. Est. fee per hire $28K-$42K; 3 seat(s) up to $105K if all filled.

TARGET COMPANIES (suggested (prestigious 0-to-1 infra builders)): AWS (Firecracker/EC2) Google Cloudflare Meta CircleCI.

BEST-FIT CANDIDATE: 5 yrs; built low-level distributed systems (not SRE); Go/Rust/C; prestigious-org 0-to-1; visa: transfers only; location: NYC 5 days.