Solutions Engineer

Blacksmith; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 220,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

Unlimited PTO

Early-exercise stock options

12 weeks fully paid parental leave

Job summary

A tech startup in San Francisco is seeking a Solutions Engineer to partner with sales and secure technical wins. You will lead technical discovery sessions and assist customers in optimizing CI performance. A strong technical background with DevOps, modern CI/CD tooling, and exceptional communication skills are essential for this role. This position offers competitive compensation, including salary, equity, and comprehensive benefits such as medical insurance and unlimited PTO.

Qualifications

• Experience in solutions engineering, field engineering, pre-sales, DevOps, or consulting.
• Hands-on understanding of modern CI/CD tooling and pipelines.
• Ability to read logs and diagnose failures.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical discovery and qualification calls with engineering teams.
• Deliver high-impact product demos and tailored technical deep dives.
• Assist customers in debugging CI performance bottlenecks.
• Build credibility with architects, engineering managers, SREs, and CTO-level stakeholders.
• Translate engineering pain into clear solution designs using Blacksmith’s CI cloud.
• Guide customers on best practices for CI modernization, ephemerald compute, cost optimization, and migration off hyperscalers.
• Assist customers in debugging CI performance bottlenecks, runner reliability issues, or pipeline misconfigurations.
• Help teams optimize GitHub Actions at scale and adopt ephemerald runners effectively.
• Maintain deep technical understanding of Blacksmith’s architecture and how it integrates into complex enterprise environments.
• Capture customer feedback and use cases, advocating for features and improvements.
• Collaborate with Engineering and Product to validate requirements, shape roadmap decisions, and improve usability for large-scale CI teams.
• Participate in strategic account planning with AEs, CSMs, and leadership.
• Identify technical expansion opportunities within existing customers.
• Ensure smooth handoff from evaluation to onboarding.

Skills

Solutions engineering

CI/CD tooling

DevOps workflows

Exceptional communication skills

Problem-solving

Cloud platforms

Tools

Terraform

Docker

Kubernetes

AWS

GCP

Azure

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 1,200+ companies and hit ~$10M in ARR in less than 2 years.

• We operate thousands of bare-metal machines across multiple regions, regularly schedule 30k+ 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.

What You’ll Do

Partner with Sales to secure the technical win

• Lead technical discovery, scoping sessions, and qualification calls with engineering, DevOps, and platform teams.

• Deliver high-impact product demos, whiteboard sessions, and tailored technical deep dives.

• Design and execute POCs, including benchmarking CI performance, optimizing pipeline architecture, and validating ROI models.
  

Act as a trusted technical advisor to customers

• Build credibility with architects, engineering managers, SREs, and CTO-level stakeholders.

• Translate engineering pain into clear solution designs using Blacksmith’s CI cloud.

• Guide customers on best practices for CI modernization, ephemerald compute, cost optimization, and migration off hyperscalers.
  

Solve technical challenges in real time

• Assist customers in debugging CI performance bottlenecks, runner reliability issues, or pipeline misconfigurations.

• Help teams optimize GitHub Actions at scale and adopt ephemerald runners effectively.

• Maintain deep technical understanding of Blacksmith’s architecture and how it integrates into complex enterprise environments.
  

Influence product direction

• Capture customer feedback and use cases, advocating for features and improvements that accelerate adoption.

• Collaborate with Engineering and Product to validate requirements, shape roadmap decisions, and improve usability for large-scale CI teams.
  

Support expansion and long-term success

• Participate in strategic account planning with AEs, CSMs, and leadership.

• Identify technical expansion opportunities within existing customers.

• Ensure smooth handoff from evaluation to onboarding, working closely with post-sales teams.

You’ll Be a Great Fit If You Have

Strong technical fluency

• Experience in solutions engineering, field engineering, pre-sales, DevOps, or consulting.

• Hands-on understanding of modern CI/CD tooling (GitHub Actions preferred), pipelines, and DevOps workflows.

• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP/Azure), containerization, or ephemerald compute systems.
  

Comfort working directly with developers

• You can read logs, diagnose failures, and reason about CI performance bottlenecks.

• You don’t need to be a full-time engineer — but you should be able to debug environments, understand code snippets, and think like a practitioner.
  

Exceptional communication & storytelling skills

• Ability to present confidently to engineering ICs, architects, and CTOs.

• Skilled at simplifying complex concepts and tying technical value to business impact.
  

Customer-obsessed problem solver

• You anticipate needs, remove friction, and help customers realize the full value of Blacksmith.

• You thrive in ambiguity and enjoy building new processes from scratch.
  

Startup DNA

• Scrappy, resourceful, fast-moving.

• Comfortable in a high-velocity, evolving technical and GTM environment.

• Energized by being part of a small, senior, talent-dense team shaping a new product category.

Bonus Points

• Experience with DevOps tooling, infrastructure automation, or ephemerald compute systems.

• Understanding of CI benchmarking, cloud cost analysis, or hyperscaler limitations.

• Experience supporting enterprise evaluations at scale (security reviews, architecture sessions, procurement support).

• Familiarity with Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, or observability tools.

• Deep curiosity about engineering productivity and developer experience.

Compensation & Benefits

• Competitive salary + meaningful equity

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance

• Unlimited PTO

• Early-exercise stock options

• 12 weeks fully paid parental leave (U.S.)

• Annual offsite.