Staff Product Engineer

Blacksmith Software Inc.; New York (NY); On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Blacksmith is seeking a Staff Product Engineer to set the technical direction for new AI-native developer tooling. This role operates at the organizational level, owning architecture, solving complex product problems, and driving 0-1 initiatives that shape how Blacksmith grows and excites customers.

You will be a key technical authority and a force multiplier, raising engineering standards across the team and owning production outcomes.

Qualifications

• Experience leading product direction from early stage to industry-recognized delivery.
• Proven ability to translate strategy into technical roadmaps.
• Strong communication with engineers, leadership and non-technical stakeholders.
• Mentor senior engineers and drive production outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Own architectural direction for new AI-native developer tooling.
• Translate business strategy into long-term technical roadmaps.
• Drive 0-1 product development from conception to initial release.
• Ensure reliability, performance and operational excellence of production systems.
• Mentor engineers and raise overall engineering standards.
• Navigate ambiguous problem spaces to define both problem and solution.

Skills

Architecture leadership

Agentic coding

Technical influence

Communication

Tools

AI tooling

Production systems

Job description

About this job

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 week, running CI for 10,000+ companies and tens of millions in ARR. We’ve grown 20x so far in 2026.
• We operate thousands of bare-metal machines across multiple regions, regularly schedule 300k+ vCPUs concurrently, and run a petabyte-scale Ceph cluster that we manage ourselves.
• We’ve raised $125M from Seed to Series C, led by Sequoia, Google Ventures (GV) & Peak XV Partners, 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 Staff Product Engineer at Blacksmith

We are looking for a Staff Product Engineer to set the technical direction for our new product(s). This role operates at the organization level, owning architecture, solving complex product problems, and driving 0-1 product initiatives that shape how Blacksmith grows and continues to excite our customers.

You will be one of the key technical authorities and a force multiplier at Blacksmith. You’ll raise engineering standards across the team, mentor senior talent and own production outcomes.
This is a high impact, hands‑on technical leader role.

What you’ll be doing

• Own and drive the architectural direction for our new product(s). These new products don’t exist in the industry today. You will be designing and building the next generation of AI native developer tooling.
• Translate business and product strategy into long-term technical roadmaps and execution plans.
• Drive the development of these products from 0-1.
• Accountable for production outcomes, including reliability, performance, and operational excellence.
• Mentor senior engineers and act as a force multiplier.
• Operate effectively in ambiguous problem spaces where both the problem and the solution need to be defined.

You’re a good fit if you have

• Expertise in building products that customers love. You’ll have come from a background where you have set and led the technical direction of a product from an early stage and developed that product through to one which is recognized industry wide as delivering an exceptional customer experience.
• Are a power user of coding agents. Our team embodies the ethos of a team that builds background agents. We operate at the forefront of agentic development and have built a best in class standard for agentic coding. You will help us further leverage these tools.
• Track record of leading through influence and shaping technical direction while operating as an individual contributor.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to engineers, leadership, and non-technical stakeholders.