General Manager, Sandboxes Engineering New York City / San Francisco

Blacksmith Software Inc.; Northern, New York (KY, NY); Hybrid; USD 230,000 - 350,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

Vision insurance

Dental insurance

Unlimited PTO

Annual offsite

Stock options

Parental leave 12 weeks

Equity

Job summary

Blacksmith Software Inc. is building the fastest cloud for code by expanding its Sandboxes business.

The General Manager will own the venture end-to-end, including product strategy, customer development, go-to-market, pricing, partnerships, adoption, revenue, and team-building. This zero-to-one role involves working directly with the founders and engineering teams to position Blacksmith as the default code-execution platform for AI agents and software workloads.

Qualifications

• Experience leading a zero-to-one infrastructure or platform business.
• Strong product and go-to-market instincts.
• Comfortable selling and onboarding customers in early-stage environments.

Responsibilities

• Develop a clear view of the sandbox market, customers, and product strategy.
• Collaborate with early customers to translate needs into roadmap.
• Make Blacksmith the default sandbox provider for AI startups 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 infrastructure.
• Recruit and lead a cross-functional team.

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 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)