Staff Systems Engineer

Company: Blacksmith
Location: New York NY (on-site; relocation assistance for exceptional candidates)
Compensation: $280000 - $380000 competitive equity
Employment Type: Full-time
Visa Sponsorship: Visa transfers only (must hold a transferable US 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 hiring a Staff-level systems engineer with deep experience building and operating large-scale distributed infrastructure. You will work at the kernel level with bare-metal machines virtualization and distributed storage own the architecture of critical platforms and change the technical direction of the team as a senior IC while Blacksmith triples its compute capacity.

• Own the architecture of infrastructure platforms that orchestrate tens of millions of Firecracker VMs a month across a global bare-metal fleet.
• Own production outcomes (reliability performance operational excellence) as compute capacity triples.
• Translate business and product strategy into long-term technical roadmaps with the technical co-founders.
• Build at the kernel and filesystem level with eBPF cgroups namespaces and low-level I/O tuning to optimize performance at petabyte scale.
• Lead complex infrastructure initiatives from problem definition through delivery.
• Mentor senior engineers and raise engineering standards.

• 8 years in low-level systems or distributed infrastructure engineering
• Built and owned large-scale distributed systems at recognized prestigious organizations
• Staff/Principal-level IC who materially changed a teams technical direction
• Low-level systems work (kernel filesystems Linux primitives): building the substrate not building on managed cloud
• Startup or high-growth scale-up experience with small teams
• Solid tenure with clearly delivered impact
• Mastery of AI coding agents in your workflow

• Systems programming in Go Rust or C/C
• Virtualization (Firecracker QEMU Cloud Hypervisor)
• Distributed storage at scale (e.g. Ceph)
• Publications patents or conference talks

Recruiter screen (30 min) two systems technical interviews (1 hour each) on-site day final chat with the CEO (30 min).

Go Rust C Firecracker QEMU Cloud Hypervisor Ceph Linux eBPF cgroups namespaces bare-metal infrastructure GitHub Actions

REVENUE: 14% of first-year salary. Est. fee per hire $39K-$53K; 3 seat(s) up to $139K if all filled.

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

BEST-FIT CANDIDATE: 8 yrs; kernel/FS/virtualization hands-on; large-scale distributed systems at prestigious org; staff IC impact startup exposure; visa: transfers only (no new); location: NYC on-site. Avoid DevOps/SRE/Kubernetes-platform operators and job hoppers.