Job Description
About the job Staff Systems Engineer
Staff Systems Engineer
Company: Blacksmith
Location: New York, NY (on-site; relocation assistance for exceptional candidates)
Compensation: $280,000 - $380,000 + competitive equity
Employment Type: Full-time
Visa Sponsorship: Visa transfers only (must hold a transferable US 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 hiring a Staff-level systems engineer with deep experience building and operating large-scale distributed infrastructure. You will work at the kernel level with bare-metal machines, virtualization and distributed storage, own the architecture of critical platforms, and change the technical direction of the team as a senior IC while Blacksmith triples its compute capacity.
What You Will Do - Own the architecture of infrastructure platforms that orchestrate tens of millions of Firecracker VMs a month across a global bare-metal fleet.
- Own production outcomes (reliability, performance, operational excellence) as compute capacity triples.
- Translate business and product strategy into long-term technical roadmaps with the technical co-founders.
- Build at the kernel and filesystem level with eBPF, cgroups, namespaces and low-level I/O tuning to optimize performance at petabyte scale.
- Lead complex infrastructure initiatives from problem definition through delivery.
- Mentor senior engineers and raise engineering standards.
What You Bring - 8+ years in low-level systems or distributed infrastructure engineering
- Built and owned large-scale distributed systems at recognized, prestigious organizations
- Staff/Principal-level IC who materially changed a team's technical direction
- Low-level systems work (kernel, filesystems, Linux primitives): building the substrate, not building on managed cloud
- Startup or high-growth scale-up experience with small teams
- Solid tenure with clearly delivered impact
- Mastery of AI coding agents in your workflow
Nice to Have - Systems programming in Go, Rust or C/C++
- Virtualization (Firecracker, QEMU, Cloud Hypervisor)
- Distributed storage at scale (e.g. Ceph)
- Publications, patents or conference talks
Interview Process Recruiter screen (30 min), two systems technical interviews (1 hour each), on-site day, final chat with the CEO (30 min).
Tech Stack Go, Rust, C, Firecracker, QEMU, Cloud Hypervisor, Ceph, Linux, eBPF, cgroups, namespaces, bare-metal infrastructure, GitHub Actions
Job Tags
Full time, Work visa, Relocation package