About Blacksmith
What is Blacksmith?
Blacksmith is building a CI cloud from the ground up. The first product helps companies run GitHub Actions substantially faster and cheaper by owning and operating Blacksmith's own global fleet of bare-metal machines rather than renting generic cloud VMs. Today, the platform "orchestrates tens of millions of Firecracker VMs each month, running CI for 2,000+ companies" and crossed $10M in ARR in less than 2 years.
The infrastructure is non-trivial: Blacksmith operates "thousands of bare-metal machines across multiple regions, regularly schedule 50k+ vCPUs concurrently, and runs a petabyte-scale Ceph cluster that we manage ourselves." The company has raised $13.5M across seed and Series A, led by Google Ventures (GV). The founding team has deep systems-and-scaling experience — "including building search/ads infrastructure at Faire, and operating large distributed systems at Cockroach Labs." GTM is led by Jon Boyer, formerly head of sales at Zapier.
Beyond CI, Blacksmith is "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" — a product called Codesmith.
Where will I work?
Blacksmith operates from two offices: New York City and San Francisco. Engineering roles are split between both; marketing, operations, and most sales are SF; some sales (Solutions Engineer) is NYC. The careers page is explicit that the team is staying "small, but exceptional."
What is the Blacksmith team like?
Blacksmith publishes six values that frame the culture: Stay optimistic ("Pessimists are often right, optimists are often rich"), Show kindness, Be contrarian, Take risks, Play hard ("We're not all work — we play hard too. Literally."), and No passengers. The hiring bar is high — the team is staying intentionally small. Engineering work spans front-end (the analytics / observability product surfaces), background agent design (Codesmith), and systems engineering (the petabyte-scale Ceph cluster, Firecracker orchestration, bare-metal fleet management).
Work-Life Balance
Blacksmith offers Unlimited PTO and an annual company offsite. The careers page lists ten benefit categories — Salary, Health, Family, Vacation, Equity, Birthdays, Offsites, Meals, Keyboard, and 401K — with the 401(k) match disclosed in full: "We match up to 5%. 100% on the first 3% and 50% on the next 2%."
Perks and Benefits
- Unlimited PTO
- Medical, vision, and dental insurance
- 401(k) match: 100% of the first 3% + 50% of the next 2% (5% effective max)
- Competitive base + equity (early-exercise stock options)
- 12 weeks fully paid parental leave (US)
- Annual company offsite
- Meals provided
- Custom keyboard of choice
- Birthdays recognised as a perk category