Startups Lead

Blacksmith; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive base salary and uncapped

Meaningful equity

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

401(k) match

Unlimited PTO

Early-exercise stock options

12 weeks of fully paid parental leave

Annual company offsite

Job summary

Blacksmith is building a startup-focused sales motion and seeks a Startups Lead to own growth with YC-backed companies and the broader venture ecosystem. You will identify, engage, and close relationships with founders and engineering leaders while shaping our go-to-market approach.

You will build a scalable pipeline, partner with founders and developers, and drive rapid but thoughtful deals that accelerate Blacksmith adoption in a fast-moving startup landscape.

Qualifications

• 2+ years of quota-carrying sales or partnerships experience.
• Experience with developer tools, infrastructure, cloud services, or technical SaaS.
• Ability to open doors, build relationships, and win new logos.
• Ability to identify promising companies early and engage them.
• Ability to manage a high volume of opportunities without compromising customer experience.
• Comfort selling to founders, CTOs, and engineers.
• Technically curious and able to understand how the product works.
• Move quickly without requiring a long enterprise process.
• Think creatively about pipeline generation beyond sequences and cold outbound.
• Want to build an original GTM motion rather than inherit one.

Responsibilities

• Own the startup ecosystem and build a territory of high-growth startups.
• Develop deep relationships with YC and broader startup community.
• Identify promising companies early and engage before key infrastructure decisions are made.
• Serve founders and engineering leaders as they evaluate Blacksmith.
• Build and run fast, lightweight sales cycles aligned to startup buying behavior.
• Generate and close a high volume of net-new partnerships.

Skills

Quota-bearing sales

Developer tools

Infrastructure knowledge

Cloud services

Technical SaaS

Hunter mindset

Relationship building

Founders engagement

Technical curiosity

Fast-paced selling

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 week, running CI for 5,000+ companies and hit ~$50M in ARR in 2.5 years. We've more than 5x’d our 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.

About the Role

As a Startups Lead you'll own Blacksmith's new business motion across early-stage startups, with a particular focus on YC companies and the broader venture-backed startup ecosystem. You'll work with companies at the point where engineering teams are growing quickly, infrastructure decisions are still being made, and developer velocity matters enormously. Your job is to identify the startups with the potential to become great Blacksmith customers, get in early, and grow with them. This is a high-velocity role. You'll build pipeline, develop relationships across the startup ecosystem, work directly with founders and engineering leaders, and close a high volume of net-new partnerships. You'll also help us build the playbook. Startups are already an important part of Blacksmith's growth, and we're looking for someone who can turn that momentum into a repeatable GTM motion.

What You'll Do

• Own the startup ecosystem
• Build and own a territory of high-growth, venture-backed startups
• Develop deep relationships across the YC ecosystem and broader startup community
• Identify promising companies early and build relationships before infrastructure decisions are locked in
• Become a trusted resource for founders and engineering leaders as they think about CI, developer infrastructure, and scaling their engineering organizations
• Build pipeline from the ground up
• Generate your own pipeline through targeted outbound, referrals, events, founder networks, VC relationships, and creative prospecting
• Use funding, hiring, GitHub activity, engineering growth, product adoption, and other signals to identify startups at the right moment to engage
• Build relationships with accelerators, investors, founders, and other people who can create leverage across the startup ecosystem
• Find creative ways to engage great companies rather than relying on high-volume outbound
• Win early and grow with customers
• Work directly with founders, CTOs, engineering leaders, and developers to understand their infrastructure and development workflows
• Help startups quickly evaluate and adopt Blacksmith
• Run fast, lightweight sales cycles that match how startups actually buy
• Identify companies with the potential to become significant Blacksmith customers as they scale
• Build relationships that can grow from an initial team into company-wide adoption
• Sell a deeply technical product
• Develop a strong understanding of CI/CD, GitHub Actions, cloud infrastructure, developer workflows, and cloud economics
• Partner with Solutions Engineers when deeper technical discovery or evaluations are required
• Understand how a startup builds and ships software and identify where Blacksmith can materially improve developer velocity
• Translate improvements in speed, reliability, and infrastructure cost into a clear value proposition for founders and engineering teams
• Help build our startup GTM motion
• Develop a point of view on how Blacksmith should win the startup market
• Help shape our YC, accelerator, and venture ecosystem programs
• Identify patterns across our fastest-growing customers and turn them into repeatable acquisition plays
• Bring feedback directly from founders and developers to product and engineering
• Experiment quickly, measure what works, and scale the motions that produce results

You'll Be a Great Fit

• Have 2+ years of quota-carrying sales or partnerships experience, ideally with developer tools, infrastructure, cloud services, or technical SaaS
• Understand how startups operate and how founders and engineering leaders make buying decisions
• Are a true hunter who enjoys opening doors, building relationships, and winning new logos
• Have strong instincts for identifying promising companies and getting involved early
• Can run a high volume of opportunities without sacrificing follow-through or customer experience
• Are comfortable selling directly to founders, CTOs, and engineers
• Are technically curious and willing to understand how the product actually works
• Move quickly. You don't need a six-step enterprise process to move a motivated customer forward
• Think creatively about pipeline generation and don't rely solely on sequences and cold outbound
• Want to build a motion rather than inherit one

Bonus Points

• You've worked at an early-stage startup yourself
• You have an existing network across YC, venture-backed startups, founders, or investors
• You've sold into Seed through Series B companies
• You've built startup, emerging, or SMB sales motions before
• You understand GitHub Actions, CI/CD, developer infrastructure, or cloud economics
• You have experience with product-led or usage-based businesses
• You're active in the startup community and genuinely enjoy meeting founders and learning what they're building
• You've built a territory, community, or ecosystem from scratch

Compensation & Benefits

• Competitive base salary and uncapped commission
• Meaningful equity
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• 401(k) match
• Unlimited PTO
• Early-exercise stock options
• 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave in the U.S.
• Annual company offsite