Senior Systems Engineer
Blacksmith · New York City
About this role
## 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 week, running CI for 7,000+ companies and tens of millions in ARR. We’ve grown 10x so far in 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 $58.5M from Seed to Series B, led by Google Ventures (GV) & Peak XV Partners, and we’re intentionally building a small, but exceptional team. ## What you’ll work on We’re extending our CI infrastructure into a broader platform: running agent sandboxes at scale and building our own background coding agent on top of it. ## You’re a good fit if you - Have developed and scaled distributed systems and enjoy digging into 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 the idea of 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 **5+ 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 startup projects. - You’re comfortable creating new processes and iterating on them quickly. ## Compensation & 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)
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