---
title: 'Head of Capacity at Blacksmith'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-capacity-blacksmith-san-francisco-xska21yw05a8'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-10'
---

# Head of Capacity at Blacksmith

- **Company:** Blacksmith
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA / New York, NY
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2026-06-01
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/blacksmith/d345cef0-3c40-4e8f-af1f-f32f9d05dbd5

## 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 3,000+ companies and hit ~$10M in ARR in less than 2 years. 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. 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.

## About the Role

Blacksmith's infrastructure footprint is growing rapidly. Every quarter, we make decisions around servers, storage, networking, datacenter capacity, power, and geographic expansion. As demand for software validation grows, ensuring that capacity is available when and where we need it becomes increasingly important. We're looking for someone to own this problem. You'll work directly with the founders and infrastructure team to forecast demand, plan capacity growth, manage supplier relationships, and ensure Blacksmith can scale ahead of customer demand. Your job is simple to describe but difficult to execute: Make sure Blacksmith never runs out of capacity.

## What You'll Do

- Own capacity planning across compute, storage, networking, and datacenter infrastructure.
- Build forecasting models for infrastructure demand and growth.
- Partner with engineering to understand future workload requirements.
- Develop deployment plans across regions and datacenter partners.
- Manage relationships with hardware vendors, datacenter providers, and infrastructure suppliers.
- Lead hardware procurement and infrastructure expansion efforts.
- Evaluate new suppliers, hardware platforms, and deployment opportunities.
- Track utilization and ensure infrastructure investments are deployed efficiently.
- Build processes and systems that allow Blacksmith to scale from thousands of servers to many times that number.

You Are a Good Fit If You

- Have experience operating large-scale infrastructure, cloud, hosting, networking, or datacenter environments.
- Have experience with capacity planning, forecasting, or infrastructure operations.
- Can balance long-term planning with day-to-day operational realities.
- Are highly analytical and comfortable making decisions under uncertainty.
- Have strong vendor management and negotiation skills.
- Can work effectively with both technical and business stakeholders.
- Enjoy solving operational problems at scale.
- Want to work closely with founders on company-critical infrastructure decisions.
- Enjoy working in person 5 days a week in SF/NYC.

Bonus

- Experience at a hyperscaler, cloud provider, hosting company, CDN, or infrastructure startup.
- Experience procuring servers, networking equipment, storage, or datacenter capacity.
- Experience managing infrastructure supply chains.
- Experience with power planning, datacenter operations, or colocation providers.
- Experience scaling infrastructure through periods of hypergrowth.

What Success Looks Like Within your first year:

- Blacksmith has a clear, data-driven capacity planning process.
- Infrastructure growth is forecasted quarters ahead of demand.
- Hardware procurement and deployment timelines are predictable.
- Vendor and datacenter relationships are strong and scalable.
- Leadership has visibility into future capacity constraints before they become operational issues.
- Blacksmith can confidently scale infrastructure without becoming constrained by supply, deployment timelines, or planning failures.

## 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)

## 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)

## Other roles at Blacksmith

- [Startups Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/startups-lead-blacksmith-san-francisco-8pqr0cj1g2mq) — San Francisco, CA
- [Account Executive, Digital Natives](https://feeny.ai/job/account-executive-digital-natives-blacksmith-san-francisco-yz3rxnr3s2vq) — San Francisco, CA / New York, NY
- [Manager, Revenue Operations](https://feeny.ai/job/manager-revenue-operations-blacksmith-san-francisco-xr1wc0634683) — San Francisco, CA
- [Technical Storyteller](https://feeny.ai/job/technical-storyteller-blacksmith-new-york-x9q5dedajcew) — New York, NY
- [Brand Designer](https://feeny.ai/job/brand-designer-blacksmith-san-francisco-sr8gv055fqvp) — San Francisco, CA / New York, NY
- [Enterprise Product Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/enterprise-product-manager-blacksmith-new-york-0aa9egntz0xv) — New York, NY
- [GTM & Ops Recruiter](https://feeny.ai/job/gtm-ops-recruiter-blacksmith-san-francisco-jgevfamc9a62) — San Francisco, CA / New York, NY
- [General Manager, Sandboxes](https://feeny.ai/job/general-manager-sandboxes-blacksmith-new-york-6bw7hknx8b9y) — New York, NY
- [Product Marketing Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/product-marketing-manager-blacksmith-san-francisco-t5jsa37g9njm) — San Francisco, CA / New York, NY
- [Head of Finance](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-finance-blacksmith-san-francisco-zkxx3s4f11cn) — San Francisco, CA