---
title: 'Senior Systems Engineer at Blacksmith'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-systems-engineer-blacksmith-new-york-yk2cm6fkc13f'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-10'
---

# Senior Systems Engineer at Blacksmith

- **Company:** Blacksmith
- **Location:** New York, NY
- **Compensation:** $200k–$300k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2025-04-30
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/blacksmith/7f13567d-a9ab-4231-b439-99b84584257f

## 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 already more than 5X'd 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 $58.5M from Seed to Series B, led by Google Ventures (GV) & Peak XV Capital, 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 5+ 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)

## 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 Capacity](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-capacity-blacksmith-san-francisco-xska21yw05a8) — San Francisco, CA / New York, NY