Staff Systems Engineer
About this role
What we're looking for
We need a Staff-level systems engineer with deep experience building and operating large-scale distributed infrastructure who has personally architected and delivered critical systems at prestigious organizations. You should be comfortable working at the kernel level with bare-metal machines, virtualization technologies, and distributed storage, and have a track record of materially changing the technical direction and trajectory of engineering teams as a senior IC. Bonus points if you've been early at a high-growth startup that scaled to industry recognition or have publications, conference talks, or patents in systems engineering.
What you'll do
Own and drive the architectural direction for critical infrastructure platforms that orchestrate tens of millions of Firecracker VMs monthly across a global fleet of bare-metal machines
Take ownership of production outcomes including reliability, performance, and operational excellence as Blacksmith triples compute capacity
Work closely with the technical co-founders to translate business and product strategy into long-term technical roadmaps and execution plans
Design and build systems at the kernel and filesystems level using eBPF, cgroups, namespaces, and low-level I/O tuning to optimize performance at petabyte scale
Lead complex infrastructure initiatives from problem definition through delivery in ambiguous problem spaces where both the problem and solution need to be defined
Mentor senior engineers and act as a force multiplier, raising engineering standards across the team and shaping how Blacksmith grows as a platform
Company at a glance
Blacksmith is a GitHub Action workflows orchestration platform leveraging bare-metal gaming CPUs to execute computationally intensive tasks efficiently. Backed by $13.5M in Google Ventures funding, it streamlines demanding workloads within GitHub-based development pipelines.
What happens next
Skip the application pile. I get you in front of the people who decide.
Confirm the fit
A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.
I pitch you to the company
I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.
A meeting lands on your calendar
When the company wants to meet, I get the call on your calendar. You just show up.
Know someone who'd be great for this?
