Brand Designer

Blacksmith; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

Vision insurance

Dental insurance

Equity

401k match

Unlimited PTO

Annual offsite

Early-exercise stock options

Parental leave (US)

Job summary

Blacksmith is seeking an experienced Brand Designer to own our visual system and narrative across our website, product interfaces, and content. You will translate technical concepts into clear visuals that earn trust with engineers and executives, building a scalable design system that grows with our platform.

You will partner with founders and engineers on launch storytelling, craft, and assets for Hacker News, X, and our blog, while shipping and iterating in public.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in brand design role, ideally in developer tools, infrastructure, or complex B2B products.
• Portfolio demonstrates systems thinking across web, motion, print, and presentation.
• Able to articulate design decisions and gain buy-in from engineers and founders.
• Love for prototyping with multiple options and leveraging tooling to speed work.
• Comfort with ambiguity and speed in a startup environment.
• Experience evolving a technical product brand, not just executing existing systems.

Responsibilities

• Own the look and sound across surfaces: website, social, events, decks, swag, and more.
• Translate complex technical concepts into visuals that build credibility with engineers.
• Build a flexible visual system that scales across products and evolves with the roadmap.
• Collaborate with founders and engineering on launch narratives and assets for public channels.
• Ship fast and iterate in public, growing the brand alongside product.
• Raise the craft bar across the team while maintaining quality at speed.

Skills

Brand design experience

Portfolio across mediums

Engineer collaboration

Prototype capability

Ambiguity tolerance

Design systems

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 hitting ~$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 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.

Our Brand Designer

We’ve obsessed over brand since day one, and we’ve been laser focused on building a brand that developers love. You can see this on every surface that you interact with Blacksmith; our website, our product interfaces, our content.

We built that foundation with a brand advisor (and investor) who we continue to work with today. Your role will be to own this internally, our first in-house brand designer. You would be inheriting a real system, not a blank page, and taking ownership of where it goes next.

What you'll do

• Own how Blacksmith looks and sounds across every surface: website, social, events, decks, swag and more.
• Translate genuinely complex technical concepts into visuals that engage and build credibility with engineers.
• Build a flexible visual system that holds up across multiple product lines and scales as we ship more, rather than a static brand guideline that goes stale in a quarter.
• Work directly with the founders and with engineering on launch narratives, from the shape of the story down to the assets that carry it on Hacker News, X, and the blog.
• Ship fast and iterate in public; treat the brand as something that evolves alongside the product.
• Raise the bar on craft across the team, ensure we maintain quality whilst we move at speed.

You’re a good fit if you have

• You're maniacal about polish and know what earns trust with a developer audience. Instinct and taste are critical here.
• 5+ years in brand design role, ideally in developer tools, infrastructure, or at the least in a complex B2B product environment.
• A portfolio that shows both systems thinking and range across mediums - web, motion, print, and presentation, with strong typography and layout at its core.
• Evidence you've built or meaningfully evolved a brand for a technical product, not just executed against someone else's system.
• The ability to articulate why a design decision is right and bring engineers and founders along with it.
• Comfort with ambiguity.
• You love to prototype, you want multiple options for every design choice and you're an expert at leveraging agentic tools to expedite this process.

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)