General Manager, Sandboxes

Blacksmith Agency; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 320,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, Vision, and Dental insurance

Competitive base + equity

Unlimited PTO

Annual offsite

Early-exercise stock options

12 weeks fully paid parental leave (US

Job summary

Blacksmith Agency in San Francisco is building the fastest cloud for code: the infra layer where software runs, tests, and fixes. We’re hiring a General Manager to lead Blacksmith’s Sandboxes business and own product strategy, customers, GTM, pricing, partnerships, adoption, revenue, and unit economics.

You will partner with the founders and engineering to make Blacksmith the default execution platform for AI agents and software work, guiding a zero‑to‑one business from the ground up.

Qualifications

• Former founder or early leader in developer infrastructure.
• Strong across product and go‑to‑market responsibilities.
• Ambitious and hungry to build something enormous.
• Comfortable selling, onboarding customers, and doing unscalable work early on.
• Hands-on and effective in ambiguous environments.
• Able to move between strategy, customer conversations, and execution.
• Owns an entire business end‑to‑end rather than a single function.

Responsibilities

• Own the sandbox market view: customers, product, and win strategy.
• Collaborate with early customers to shape the roadmap for agents and code-execution products.
• Position Blacksmith as the default sandbox provider for startups, developers, and enterprises.
• Build repeatable acquisition, onboarding, retention, and expansion motions.
• Own pricing, packaging, partnerships, adoption, revenue, and unit economics.
• Establish Blacksmith as the technical and commercial leader in sandbox infra.
• Recruit and lead a cross-functional team.

Skills

Product strategy

Go-to-market

Cross-functional leadership

Technical credibility

Sales & onboarding

Job description

• 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 5X’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 role

Blacksmith is building the fastest cloud for code: the infra layer where software gets run, tested, and fixed. As AI makes code generation cheaper, the bottleneck is shifting from writing code to running it quickly, at scale. Every agent workflow needs a fast, isolated place to run.

We are hiring a General Manager to build Blacksmith’s Sandboxes business.

You will own the business end-to-end: product strategy, customer development, go-to-market, pricing, partnerships, adoption, revenue, unit economics, and team-building.

This is a zero-to-one role. You will work directly with Blacksmith’s founders and engineering team to make Blacksmith the default execution platform for AI agents and software work.

The role should feel like building a new infrastructure company, except you will start with Blacksmith’s compute and storage fleet, execution stack, customers, capital, and distribution.

What you’ll do

• Develop a clear view of the sandbox market, customers, product, and how Blacksmith wins.

• Work directly with early customers building agents and other code-execution products, turning their needs into the roadmap.

• Make Blacksmith the default sandbox provider for AI startups, developer companies, and larger enterprises.

• Build repeatable acquisition, onboarding, retention, and expansion motions.

• Own pricing, packaging, partnerships, adoption, revenue, and unit economics.

• Establish Blacksmith as the technical and commercial leader in sandbox infrastructure.

• Recruit and lead a dedicated cross-functional team.

Who you are

You may be a former founder, an early leader at a developer-infrastructure company, or someone who has built a technical product from zero to meaningful adoption.

You are:

• Technically credible with engineers and technical founders.

• Strong across both product and go-to-market.

• Exceptionally ambitious and hungry to build something enormous, not merely launch a successful product.

• Comfortable personally selling, onboarding customers, and doing unscalable work before a mature motion exists.

• Highly urgent, hands-on, and effective in ambiguous environments.

• Able to move between strategy, customer conversations, product decisions, and execution.

• Excited to own an entire business rather than a single function.

You do not need to be a systems engineer, but you should be fluent in developer platforms, distributed systems, workload isolation, infrastructure economics, APIs, reliability, and security.

This role is not a fit if

• You have primarily managed mature products with established product-market fit.

• You want to build a large team before personally doing the work.

• You are more comfortable coordinating functions than directly owning outcomes.

• You need a well-defined roadmap or organizational structure to make progress.

Compensation and benefits

• Medical, Vision, and Dental insurance.

• Competitive base + equity.

• Unlimited PTO.

• Annual offsite.

• Early-exercise stock options

• 12 weeks fully paid parental leave (US)