Business Operations Lead

Blacksmith; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 170,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

Vision insurance

Dental insurance

401K match

Unlimited PTO

Annual offsite

Early-exercise stock options

Parental leave

Job summary

Blacksmith is hiring for a hands-on operations role in San Francisco, requiring a track record of moving fast in startup or consulting settings. The candidate will own operational processes from onboarding to vendor management and strive to move the company forward with operational excellence.

Ideal candidates thrive in ambiguity, are resourceful, and enjoy collaborating with a small, impact-driven team. This in-person role is based in SF, five days a week, with competitive base pay and equity.

Qualifications

• Startup experience in fast-paced environments.
• Proven ability to own and run core operational processes.
• Comfort working in ambiguity and driving leverage.

Skills

Startup experience

Operations execution

Ambiguity management

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

• We operate thousands of bare-metal machines across multiple regions, regularly schedule 50k+ 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.

You are a good fit if you

• Are sharp, resourceful, and thrive in ambiguity. You can quickly pick things up, make sense of messy or undefined problems, and just figure it out.

• Care deeply about making the founders more effective. You operate like a force multiplier by anticipating needs, unblocking bottlenecks, and proactively driving leverage.

• Can own and run core operational processes that keep the company moving, from paying bills to onboarding employees to managing vendors.

• Are detail-oriented and sweat the small stuff like calendars, docs, follow-ups, and processes all run better with you involved.

• Love automating anything that can be automated, proactively use AI tools to figure things out, and are highly resourceful when you don’t know the answer yet.

• Have prior experience in startups, consulting, operations, or other fast-paced environments where ambiguity is the norm.

• Want to be part of a small team where your work has real impact, and where success in this role can evolve into leading a critical part of the company over time.

• Enjoy working in person 5 days a week in SF.

Compensation and benefits

• Competitive base + equity.

• Medical, Vision, and Dental insurance.

• 401K match.

• Unlimited PTO.

• Annual offsite.

• Early-exercise stock options

• 12 weeks fully paid parental leave (US)

Compensation

$170K – $210K • Offers Equity