--- title: 'Startups Lead at Blacksmith' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/startups-lead-blacksmith-san-francisco-8pqr0cj1g2mq' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-10' --- # Startups Lead at Blacksmith - **Company:** Blacksmith - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** onsite - **Posted:** 2026-08-14 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/blacksmith/39315b77-1ffc-40fc-86c4-6b9683e3181f ## 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 5,000+ companies and hit ~$50M in ARR in 2.5 years. We've more than 5x’d our 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. ## About the Role As a Startups Lead you'll own Blacksmith's motion across early-stage startups, with a particular focus on YC companies and the broader VC-backed startup ecosystem. You'll work with companies at the point where engineering teams are growing quickly, infrastructure decisions are still being made, and developer velocity matters enormously. Your job is to identify the startups with the potential to become great Blacksmith customers, get in early, and grow with them. Your goal is to ensure Blacksmith is setting them up for success. This is a high-velocity role. You'll build pipeline, develop relationships across the startup ecosystem, work directly with founders and engineering leaders, and close a high volume of net-new partnerships. You'll also help us build the playbook. Startups are already an important part of Blacksmith's growth, and we're looking for someone who can turn that momentum into a repeatable GTM motion. ## What You'll Do Own the startup ecosystem - Build and own a territory of high-growth, venture-backed startups. - Develop deep relationships across the YC ecosystem and broader startup community. - Identify promising companies early and build relationships before infrastructure decisions are locked in. - Become a trusted resource for founders and engineering leaders as they think about CI, developer infrastructure, and scaling their engineering organizations. Build pipeline from the ground up - Generate your own pipeline through targeted outbound, referrals, events, founder networks, VC relationships, and creative prospecting. - Use funding, hiring, GitHub activity, engineering growth, product adoption, and other signals to identify startups at the right moment to engage. - Build relationships with accelerators, investors, founders, and other people who can create leverage across the startup ecosystem. - Find creative ways to engage great companies rather than relying on high-volume outbound. Win early and grow with customers - Work directly with founders, CTOs, engineering leaders, and developers to understand their infrastructure and development workflows. - Help startups quickly evaluate and adopt Blacksmith. - Run fast, lightweight sales cycles that match how startups actually buy. - Identify companies with the potential to become significant Blacksmith customers as they scale. - Build relationships that can grow from an initial team into company-wide adoption. Sell a deeply technical product - Develop a strong understanding of CI/CD, GitHub Actions, cloud infrastructure, developer workflows, and cloud economics. - Partner with Solutions Engineers when deeper technical discovery or evaluations are required. - Understand how a startup builds and ships software and identify where Blacksmith can materially improve developer velocity. - Translate improvements in speed, reliability, and infrastructure cost into a clear value proposition for founders and engineering teams. Help build our startup GTM motion - Develop a point of view on how Blacksmith should win the startup market. - Help shape our YC, accelerator, and venture ecosystem programs. - Identify patterns across our fastest-growing customers and turn them into repeatable acquisition plays. - Bring feedback directly from founders and developers to product and engineering. - Experiment quickly, measure what works, and scale the motions that produce results. You'll Be a Great Fit If You - Have 2+ years of quota-carrying sales or partnerships experience, ideally with developer tools, infrastructure, cloud services, or technical SaaS. - Understand how startups operate and how founders and engineering leaders make buying decisions. - Are a true hunter who enjoys opening doors, building relationships, and winning new logos. - Have strong instincts for identifying promising companies and getting involved early. - Can run a high volume of opportunities without sacrificing follow-through or customer experience. - Are comfortable selling directly to founders, CTOs, and engineers. - Are technically curious and willing to understand how the product actually works. - Move quickly. You don't need a six-step enterprise process to move a motivated customer forward. - Think creatively about pipeline generation and don't rely solely on sequences and cold outbound. - Want to build a motion rather than inherit one. Bonus Points - You've worked at an early-stage startup yourself. - You have an existing network across YC, venture-backed startups, founders, or investors. - You've sold into Seed through Series B companies. - You've built startup, emerging, or SMB sales motions before. - You understand GitHub Actions, CI/CD, developer infrastructure, or cloud economics. - You have experience with product-led or usage-based businesses. - You're active in the startup community and genuinely enjoy meeting founders and learning what they're building. - You've built a territory, community, or ecosystem from scratch. ## Compensation & Benefits - Competitive base salary and uncapped commission - Meaningful equity - Medical, dental, and vision insurance - 401(k) match - Unlimited PTO - Early-exercise stock options - 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave in the U.S. - Annual company offsite ## 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 - [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 - [Head of Finance](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-finance-blacksmith-san-francisco-zkxx3s4f11cn) — San Francisco, CA