engineering
Posted Mar 31Principal Systems Engineer
at Blacksmith
New York City, United StatesOn-site
Requirements
- 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 3,000+ companies and hit ~$10M in ARR in less than 2 years.
- 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’re a good fit if you have - Deep familiarity with virtualization technologies such as Firecracker, QEMU, or Cloud Hypervisor, and an understanding of the tradeoffs between them. -
- Experience with distributed storage systems (e.g., Ceph) and a strong grasp of low-level file system performance, I/O tuning, and storage reliability at scale. - Comfort working at the kernel and filesystems level:
Benefits
- experience with eBPF, cgroups, namespaces, or similar Linux primitives. - Track record of leading through influence and shaping technical direction while operating as an individual contributor. - Strong communication skills, with the ability to explain complex systems-level concepts to engineers, leadership, and non-technical stakeholders. 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)
Additional details
- About Blacksmith - We started by building infrastructure to run CI workloads really fast.
- We’ve more than tripled revenue since the start of 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 $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.