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

REVENUE: 14% of first-year salary. Est. fee per hire $39K-$53K; 3 seat(s) = up to $139K if all filled.

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

BEST-FIT CANDIDATE: 8+ yrs; kernel/FS/virtualization hands-on; large-scale distributed systems at prestigious org; staff IC impact + startup exposure; visa: transfers only (no new); location: NYC on-site. Avoid DevOps/SRE/Kubernetes-platform operators and job hoppers.