---
title: 'Executive Assistant (to the CEO) at Blacksmith'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/executive-assistant-to-the-ceo-blacksmith-san-francisco-20e2pvt3189a'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-15'
---

# Executive Assistant (to the CEO) at Blacksmith

- **Company:** Blacksmith
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $160k–$185k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2026-09-29
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-15
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/blacksmith/9ad6d1bc-6b2c-4b5c-82d9-7ec3b2476471

## 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 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.
- 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.

This is a critical role, supporting the CEO through exceptional growth (we grew 12x last year & have already grown another 5x so far in 2026). You’ll own the logistics & keep things running in a way that enables the CEO to fully focus on the success of the business.

This is a no egos role; you’ll preempt the need & jump into every task, acting as the CEO’s right hand as we hit this next phase of growth. In return, you’ll be entrusted with the most critical insights into running our business, a front seat at a true hypergrowth startup.

## What you'll own

Calendar and time

- Own the CEO's calendar end to end - scheduling, sequencing, protecting focus time, and making the hard prioritization calls about what earns a slot.
- Build and maintain a lightweight "CEO operating system": weekly priorities, open loops, follow-ups, reminders.
- Prep the CEO for every meeting - context, pre-reads, agendas, who's in the room and why.
- Capture action items and make sure nothing drops after the meeting ends.

Critical communications

- Manage the CEO's inbox: triage, prioritize, and draft responses in their voice.
- Serve as a trusted point of contact for investors, board members, design partners, customers, and press - with judgment about what needs the CEO and what you can handle yourself.
- Coordinate with EAs and chiefs of staff at partner, customer, and investor organizations.
- Handle sensitive information with complete discretion.

Travel and personal logistics

- Plan and book domestic and international travel end to end - flights, hotels etc.
- Coordinate appointments, household services, purchases, deliveries, family travel, and other personal administration so they slot cleanly around professional priorities, and build systems that make the CEO's life admin run without their attention.
- Solve problems in real time when plans change.

Office and team

- Assist in the running of the San Francisco office day to day: vendors, supplies, food, space, the small things that make people want to come in.
- Help to coordinate offsites, team dinners, customer dinners, and networking events.
- Be the person who notices what's broken and fixes it before anyone asks.

## What we're looking for

- Proven experience supporting c-suite executives in the fastest paced environments. You have either supported the CEO of another hypergrowth startup, or you have supported Partners at the most demanding investment banking, private equity or venture capital firms.
- The ability to preempt a need and to fill that need, without explicit direction.
- The highest sense of urgency to all tasks; you are relentlessly focused on delivery.
- A no ego approach to your work. Whatever the task, you own it.
- Strong judgment and prioritization instincts: you know what matters most, and why.
- Exceptional written communication, including the ability to write clearly in someone else's voice.
- Comfort with ambiguity, shifting priorities, and a company that looks different every quarter.
- High EQ, real discretion, and obsessive attention to detail.
- Fluency with modern tools (Google Workspace, Slack, Notion, Linear) and a strong understanding of how a tech startup operates.
- Comfort supporting both professional and personal logistics.

This role may not be for you if

- You primarily think of an EA role as calendar management.
- You need every task to be clearly defined before beginning.
- You wait for direction when you can see that something needs to be done.
- You are uncomfortable handling personal logistics or operational tasks.
- You strongly prefer predictable days and fixed priorities.
- You care more about the perceived seniority of a task than whether it needs to get done.
- You want a remote or hybrid role.
- You don’t operate with a strong sense of urgency or move quickly when something matters.

## Compensation and benefits

- Competitive base + equity.
- Medical, Vision, and Dental insurance.
- 401K match.
- Unlimited PTO.
- Annual offsite.
- Early-exercise stock options

## About Blacksmith

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Blacksmith is a high-performance CI cloud platform that runs GitHub Actions on purpose-built hardware to accelerate build, test, and deployment workflows.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Startup, backed by Y Combinator and Google Ventures)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, CA, USA (with an office in New York City)
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Aditya Maru, Aditya "JP" Jayaprakash, and Aayush Shah

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Developer Infrastructure / CI/CD (Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery)
- **Target customers**: B2B, primarily software engineering teams of all sizes (from startups to enterprises) using GitHub Actions
- **Mission or purpose**: To be the compute layer for CI — making developers’ feedback loops as fast as possible by providing a drop-in replacement for GitHub-hosted runners that is faster, more observable, and more cost-efficient.

## Products & Services
- **Blacksmith CI Platform (SaaS)**: A cloud-based service that replaces standard GitHub Actions runners with bare-metal microVMs running on high-performance gaming CPUs. Key features include:
    - **2x faster hardware** (highest single-core performance)
    - **4x faster cache downloads** (co-located caching)
    - **40x faster Docker builds** (NVMe persistence)
    - **Advanced observability** (global log search, inline PR failure comments, job-level insights)
    - **Instant provisioning** and unlimited concurrency
    - Claimed to be 75% more cost-efficient than GitHub runners and a drop-in replacement (one-line YAML change)

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding (undisclosed amount, but backed by Y Combinator and Google Ventures); also reports **50M+ jobs processed monthly** and **30,000+ happy developers** across **3,000+ organizations**
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Y Combinator (backed), Google Ventures (backed), and angel investors including Kelsey Hightower (former Distinguished Engineer, Google), Spencer Kimball (CEO, Cockroach Labs), David Cramer (Co-founder, Sentry), Theo Browne (Founder, t3.gg), and Kelvin Beachum (NFL athlete, Arizona Cardinals)
- **Growth Signals**: Launched in 2024, grew to a team of 25, acquired 30,000+ users and 3,000+ customer organizations within the first year, and is actively hiring across engineering, sales, marketing, and operations roles in both San Francisco and New York City.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Purpose-built hardware**: Uses bare-metal gaming CPUs with the highest single-core performance available, specifically optimized for the CI workload, unlike generic cloud VMs from hyperscalers (AWS, GCP, Azure).
- **Co-located caching**: Cache artifacts are stored in the same data center where jobs run, dramatically reducing download times compared to solutions where cache is remote.
- **Cost efficiency**: Claims 75% lower cost than GitHub-hosted runners while providing significantly better performance.
- **Drop-in simplicity**: Integration is a single-line change in the GitHub Actions YAML file, with no credit card required to start.
- **Founding team pedigree**: Founders are University of Waterloo graduates and former engineers at Cockroach Labs and Faire (YC W17), bringing deep infrastructure and scaling expertise.

## Strategic Focus
- **Current priorities**: Scaling the platform to handle increasing job volume, expanding observability features, and building out the go-to-market team (active hiring for Sales, Marketing, and Customer-facing roles).
- **Future direction**: While starting with GitHub Actions, the company plans to expand to other CI platforms such as BuildKite, GitLab, and Jenkins, aiming to become the universal compute layer for CI — going after the $10B CI compute market currently dominated by hyperscalers.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Values-driven environment emphasizing “No passengers,” “Be contrarian,” “Take risks,” “Play hard,” “Show kindness,” and “Stay optimistic.” The team is described as lean (25 people), exceptionally talented, and multidisciplinary.
- **Remote/Hybrid Policy**: Hybrid model with offices in San Francisco and New York City. Roles are listed for specific locations, suggesting in-office presence is expected.
- **Notable Perks**:
    - Competitive salary and equity (with early exercise tax benefits)
    - 5% 401K match (100% on first 3%, 50% on next 2%)
    - Health, dental, and vision insurance
    - Paid family leave
    - Unlimited PTO
    - Birthday off + a Michelin star dinner for you and a +1
    - Team offsites and Michelin star team dinners
    - Choice of mechanical keyboard
    - Lunch on Fridays
- **Engineering Culture**: Small, high-agency team where engineers are expected to own large areas of the product. Strong emphasis on taking risks, moving fast, and building infrastructure from the ground up.

## Sources
1. [blacksmith.sh](https://www.blacksmith.sh/)
2. [blacksmith.sh/company](https://www.blacksmith.sh/company)
3. [blacksmith.sh/careers](https://www.blacksmith.sh/careers)
4. [Y Combinator](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/blacksmith)
5. [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/blacksmithrun)
6. [Ashby Careers Page](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/blacksmith)

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