Systems Engineer

Blacksmith is building a cloud CI platform that unbundles CI workloads from hyperscalers, delivering faster and cheaper CI on our own bare-metal fleet. You’ll be part of an early-stage infrastructure team responsible for designing, building, and operating the core systems that power millions of CI jobs for 2,500+ startups. This role directly impacts reliability, performance, and the developer experience of our customers.

What youll do

• Design, build, and operate distributed systems and core infrastructure components (databases, key-value stores, and storage).
• Scale CI workloads across our bare-metal fleet to improve performance and cost efficiency.
• Improve reliability and performance across filesystem, network, and storage stacks.
• Automate and manage self-hosted infrastructure using build automation and configuration management tools (e.g., Ansible, Puppet, Chef).
• Collaborate with product and engineering teams to support developer-focused systems and roadmap execution.

What Blacksmith is looking for

• 5+ years of Senior/Staff level Systems Engineer experience building distributed systems and core infrastructure components at systems companies/startups or big tech/FAANG.
• Ability to work in person 4-5 days a week in NYC.
• Familiarity with distributed storage systems like Ceph or MinIO.
• Experience with systems infrastructure at quant funds/shops (e.g., HRT, Citadel).
• Experience with build automation and configuration management tools (e.g., Ansible, Puppet, Chef).
• Experience with networking, distributed file systems, or storage.
• Proficiency in Go, Rust, or C++.
• Strong CS fundamentals (education to reflect this).
• Experience developing and scaling distributed systems and building systems for developers.
• Experience optimizing performance and reliability across the filesystem, network, and storage.