Senior Systems Engineer
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At a glance
Job overview
Blacksmith is hiring a Senior Systems Engineer. Blacksmith builds a fast CI infrastructure using a global fleet of bare‑metal machines and orchestrates millions of Firecracker VMs for thousands of companies. The senior systems engineer will develop and scale distributed systems, debug performance and reliability issues, and manage self‑hosted infrastructure with tools like Ansible, Puppet, and Chef while working onsite in New York.
Key focus areas include Develop and scale distributed systems focusing on performance and reliability, Write and debug code in C, C++, Go, Rust, or Zig with emphasis on efficiency and safety, and Build, automate, and manage infrastructure using tools such as Ansible, Puppet, and Chef.
Successful candidates bring 5+ Years Software Development Experience and Work In Person 5 Days A Week In NYC. Important skills include Distributed Systems, Performance Debugging, Reliability Issues Debugging, C, C++, and Go. Preferred (not required): Creating New Processes and Iterating Quickly.
Skills & qualifications
Skills
Qualifications
Benefits
Full job description
About Blacksmith
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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Have developed and scaled distributed systems and enjoy digging into performance and reliability issues across the filesystem, network, and storage stack.
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Are comfortable writing and debugging in C, C++, Go, Rust, or Zig, and care deeply about efficiency, correctness, and safety at the systems level.
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Are excited by the idea of self-hosting and managing infrastructure with build automation and configuration management tools (e.g., Ansible, Puppet, Chef).
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Have familiarity with distributed storage systems like Ceph or MinIO, or are eager to get hands-on with them.
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Have 5+ years of software development experience, ideally in performance-critical or distributed environments.
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Enjoy working in person 5 days a week in NYC with a small, tight-knit team.
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Thrive in the ambiguity of an early-stage startup and are energized by building from first principles.
Bonus
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You’ve dabbled in your own side hustles or start-up projects.
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You’re comfortable creating new processes and iterating on them quickly.
Compensation and benefits
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Medical, Vision, and Dental insurance.
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Competitive base + equity.
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401K match.
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Unlimited PTO.
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Annual offsite.
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Early-exercise stock options
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12 weeks fully paid parental leave (US)
You've read the whole posting — now see how you match it.