Staff System Engineer

Blacksmith; New York (NY); On-site; USD 210,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Blacksmith is seeking a Staff Systems Engineer to set the technical direction for our core infrastructure. You will own architecture, drive reliability, and mentor senior engineers while delivering production outcomes at scale.

You will translate business needs into long-term technical roadmaps and lead critical infrastructure platforms, operating as a hands-on individual contributor in a fast-growing CI infrastructure company.

Qualifications

• Experience architecting large-scale infrastructure and ownership of production reliability.
• Ability to drive long-term technical roadmaps from business strategy.
• Proven track record mentoring senior engineers and enabling scale.
• Excellent communication across technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Own and drive architectural direction for critical infrastructure platforms.
• Translate business and product strategy into long-term technical roadmaps and execution plans.
• 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.

Skills

Virtualization tech

Firecracker

QEMU

Cloud Hypervisor

Ceph storage

Linux kernel / FS

eBPF

Cgroups

Namespaces

Technical leadership

Strong communication

Tools

Firecracker

QEMU

Cloud Hypervisor

Ceph

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 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 Systems Engineer at Blacksmith

We are looking for a Staff Engineer to help set the technical direction for our core infrastructure, critical to the Blacksmith product. This role operates at the organization level, owning architecture, solving complex systems problems, and driving initiatives that shape how Blacksmith grows, performs, and remains reliable.

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 critical infrastructure platforms.


• Translate business and product strategy into long-term technical roadmaps and execution plans.


• 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

• Deep familiarity with virtualization technologies such as Firecracker, QEMU, or Cloud Hypervisor, and an understanding of the tradeoffs between them.


• Experience with distributed storage systems (e.g., Ceph) and a strong grasp of low-level file system performance, I/O tuning, and storage reliability at scale.


• Comfort working at the kernel and filesystems level: experience with eBPF, cgroups, namespaces, or similar Linux primitives.


• 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 systems-level concepts to engineers, leadership, and non-technical stakeholders.