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