Senior Systems Engineer

Senior Systems Engineer

Company: Blacksmith
Location: New York, NY (in office 5 days per week)
Compensation: $200,000 - $300,000 + competitive equity
Employment Type: Full-time
Visa Sponsorship: Visa transfers only (must already hold a transferable work visa)

About Blacksmith

Blacksmith started by making CI workloads run much faster: its first product runs GitHub Actions substantially faster and cheaper on its own global fleet of bare-metal machines instead of rented cloud VMs. It now orchestrates tens of millions of Firecracker VMs a month for 3,000+ companies, schedules 100k+ vCPUs concurrently, and runs a petabyte-scale Ceph cluster it manages itself.

Blacksmith reached about $10M ARR in under two years, has grown revenue more than 5x since the start of 2026, and has raised $58.5M through its Series B.

The Role

Blacksmith is looking for an engineer with 5+ years building and scaling low-level distributed systems who has delivered meaningful zero-to-one infrastructure at a prestigious organization. You will work with the technical co-founders and a small, elite team on hard infrastructure problems from first principles, in person in New York. This is not a DevOps/SRE role: Blacksmith needs someone who has built systems, not just managed hyperscale infrastructure.

What You Will Do

• Design, build and scale infrastructure that orchestrates tens of millions of Firecracker VMs a month across a global bare-metal fleet.
• Own critical storage, networking and scheduling challenges at petabyte scale as compute capacity triples.
• Develop performance-critical systems in Go, Rust or C/C++ with a focus on efficiency, correctness and reliability.
• Lead infrastructure projects end to end that enable enterprise customers and new products such as agent sandboxes and background coding agents.
• Use and orchestrate AI coding agents to accelerate development.

What You Bring

• 5+ years building and scaling low-level distributed systems
• Something significant you built and owned at a recognizable organization
• Experience with distributed storage (such as Ceph or MinIO) or similar large-scale data systems
• A strong IC who changes the trajectory of the team around them
• Comfort building from scratch in a fast-scaling startup
• Proficiency with AI-assisted development and agent orchestration

Nice to Have

• Founded or was early at a startup that became a recognized leader
• Publications, patents or conference talks

Tech Stack

Go, Rust, C, C++, Zig, Firecracker, Ceph, Linux, Ansible, bare-metal infrastructure, distributed systems, AI coding agents

REVENUE: 14% of first-year salary. Est. fee per hire $28K-$42K; 3 seat(s) = up to $105K if all filled.

TARGET COMPANIES (suggested (prestigious 0-to-1 infra builders)): AWS (Firecracker/EC2), Google, Cloudflare, Fly.io, Meta, CircleCI.

BEST-FIT CANDIDATE: 5+ yrs; built low-level distributed systems (not SRE); Go/Rust/C++; prestigious-org 0-to-1; visa: transfers only; location: NYC 5 days.