Head of Finance

Blacksmith Software Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 130,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, Vision, and Dental insurance

401K match

Unlimited PTO

12 weeks fully paid parental leave

Job summary

Blacksmith Software Inc. in San Francisco is looking for a strategic finance expert to own financial planning and forecasting while collaborating closely with the founders. The role involves making key decisions on capital allocation and growth strategies.

With 7+ years in strategic finance or a technology company, you will help build the financial foundation as the company scales. Competitive compensation includes equity and benefits like unlimited PTO and parental leave.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in strategic finance or high-growth technology.
• Exceptional financial modeling skills.
• Ability to solve ambiguous problems.

Responsibilities

• Own financial planning, forecasting, budgeting, and board reporting.
• Build models to support strategic decisions.
• Partner with engineering teams for investment forecasting.

Skills

Strategic finance

Financial modeling

Communication with engineers and executives

Capital structure strategy

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 more than tripled 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 $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.

About the Role

This is not a traditional SaaS finance role.

Yes, you'll own forecasting, planning, reporting, and the core finance function. But you'll also work directly with the founders on some of the company's most important decisions:

• How should we allocate capital as Blacksmith scales?
• How much infrastructure should we invest in and when?
• How do we balance growth, reliability, and capital efficiency?
• How should we finance infrastructure growth through a combination of equity, cash flow, and debt?
• How do we think about pricing, margins, and long‑term unit economics?
• When should we raise capital and how much?

You'll help build the financial foundation for a company that sits at the intersection of software and large‑scale infrastructure.

As Blacksmith scales, we expect infrastructure investment to become a major use of capital. We're looking for someone who can help us think through not only how much capacity to build, but how that growth should be financed.

What You’ll Do

• Own financial planning, forecasting, budgeting, and board reporting.
• Build models to support company planning and strategic decision‑making.
• Partner with engineering and infrastructure teams to forecast infrastructure investment and capacity requirements.
• Own cash forecasting, treasury management, capital planning, and financing strategy.
• Analyze pricing, margins, and business performance.
• Support fundraising, investor relations, and strategic projects.
• Build the systems and processes that will scale with the company.

You Are a Good Fit If You

• Have 7+ years of experience in strategic finance, FP&A, investment banking, private equity, growth equity, or a high‑growth technology company.
• Are an exceptional financial modeler.
• Enjoy solving ambiguous, first‑principles problems.
• Can communicate effectively with both engineers and executives.
• Have strong business judgment and a bias toward action.
• Want to work closely with founders and help shape company strategy.
• Understand how high‑growth companies finance expansion and think strategically about capital structure.
• Enjoy working in person 5 days a week in SF.

Bonus

• Experience in an infrastructure, cloud, or developer tools company.
• Experience with consumption‑based businesses.
• Experience with fundraising, capital planning, debt facilities, equipment financing, or infrastructure‑intensive businesses.
• Experience building a finance function from the ground up.

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)