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 7,000+ companies and tens of millions in ARR. We’ve grown 10x so far in 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 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.
You are a good fit if you
Have developed and scaled distributed systems and enjoy digging into performance and reliability issues across the filesystem, network, and storage stack.
Are comfortable writing and debugging in C, C++, Go, Rust, or Zig, and care deeply about efficiency, correctness, and safety at the systems level.
Are excited by the idea of self-hosting and managing infrastructure with build automation and configuration management tools (e.g., Ansible, Puppet, Chef).
Have familiarity with distributed storage systems like Ceph or MinIO, or are eager to get hands-on with them.
Have 5+ years of software development experience, ideally in performance-critical or distributed environments.
Enjoy working in person 5 days a week in NYC with a small, tight-knit team.
Thrive in the ambiguity of an early-stage startup and are energized by building from first principles.
Bonus
You’ve dabbled in your own side hustles or start-up projects.
You’re comfortable creating new processes and iterating on them quickly.
Compensation and benefits
Medical, Vision, and Dental insurance.
Competitive base + equity.
401K match.
Unlimited PTO.
Annual offsite.
Early-exercise stock options
12 weeks fully paid parental leave (US)
Skills Required
- Developed and scaled distributed systems
- 5+ years of software development experience
- Familiarity with distributed storage systems like Ceph or MinIO
- Experience in build automation and configuration management tools
Blacksmith Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Blacksmith and has not been reviewed or approved by Blacksmith.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Time off is presented as unlimited with paid family leave and a guaranteed birthday off, indicating breadth beyond the basics. The combination signals formal support for recovery and life events.
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Retirement Support — A 401(k) match up to 5% (100% on the first 3%, 50% on the next 2%) is explicitly detailed, indicating meaningful employer-funded savings. This clarity around the match strengthens long‑term financial support.
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Equity Value & Accessibility — Stock options are offered with the ability to early‑exercise, improving accessibility to potential equity value. This structure can create tax advantages for employees.
Blacksmith Insights
What We Do
Blacksmith is the fastest way to run your GitHub Action workflows. We orchestrate your workflows over our fleet of bare-metal gaming CPUs with your build caches co-located right next to your CI jobs. All it takes is a one-line code change. Get started with Blacksmith https://docs.blacksmith.sh/getting-started/quickstart
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