Founders Associate

blacksmith; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 90,000 - 140,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

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

Job summary

Blacksmith in San Francisco is seeking a Founders Associate to help the founders operate more efficiently in a hypergrowth startup. You will own critical operational processes, from paying bills to onboarding employees and managing vendors, allowing the team to focus on strategic priorities.

This role thrives on ambiguity, requires a hands-on, no-ego approach, and offers a front-row seat to rapid growth with meaningful impact and potential to lead a key function over time.

Qualifications

• Ability to pick up messy or undefined problems quickly.
• Drive efficiency for founders by anticipating needs and unblocking bottlenecks.
• Own key operational processes: paying bills, onboarding, vendor management.
• Be detail-oriented and reliable, never drop the ball.

Responsibilities

• Own and run core operational processes that keep the company moving, from paying bills to onboarding employees to managing vendors.
• Provide hands-on support to founders to improve efficiency and execution in a hypergrowth setting.

Skills

Ambiguity handling

Operations management

Automation / AI tooling

Startup experience

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 4X’ed 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.

The Founders Associate thrives in ambiguity and obsesses over ensuring the founders are able to operate as efficiently and effectively as possible. You take a no-ego approach and want to take as much responsibility as possible, freeing up the founders to execute on the highest priority tasks.

This is a front row seat to operating a truly hypergrowth business. We grew 12X in 2025, have already grown over 4X again so far this year and this curve is accelerating. You will get the opportunity to truly impact this next phase of growth.

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 - and you never drop the ball.
• 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)