Systems Engineer
Company: Blacksmith
Location: New York City
Posted on: April 1, 2026
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Job Description:
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 2,000 companies and hit
~$10M in ARR in less than 2 years. We operate thousands of
bare-metal machines across multiple regions, regularly schedule 50k
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. You are 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 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. Compensation and 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)
Keywords: Blacksmith, Sayreville , Systems Engineer, IT / Software / Systems , New York City, New Jersey
