Principal Systems Engineer
Company: Blacksmith
Location: New York City
Posted on: April 2, 2026
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Job Description:
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 month, running CI for 2,000 companies and hit
>$10M in ARR in less than 2 years. We operate thousands of
bare-metal machines across multiple regions, regularly schedule 50k
vCPUs concurrently, and run a petabyte-scale Ceph cluster that we
manage ourselves. We’ve raised $13.5M across Seed and Series A, led
by Google Ventures (GV), 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. The Principal Systems
Engineer at Blacksmith We are looking for a Principal Engineer to
set the technical direction for our core infrastructure, critical
to the Blacksmith product. This role operates at the organization
level, owning architecture, solving complex systems problems, and
driving initiatives that shape how Blacksmith grows, performs, and
remains reliable. You will be one of the key technical authorities
and a force multiplier at Blacksmith. You’ll raise engineering
standards across the team, mentor senior talent and own production
outcomes. This is a high impact, hands-on technical leader role.
What you’ll be doing Own and drive the architectural direction for
critical infrastructure platforms. Translate business and product
strategy into long-term technical roadmaps and execution plans.
Accountable for production outcomes, including reliability,
performance, and operational excellence. Mentor senior engineers
and act as a force multiplier. Operate effectively in ambiguous
problem spaces where both the problem and the solution need to be
defined. You’re a good fit if you have Deep familiarity with
virtualization technologies such as Firecracker, QEMU, or Cloud
Hypervisor, and an understanding of the tradeoffs between them.
Experience with distributed storage systems (e.g., Ceph) and a
strong grasp of low-level file system performance, I/O tuning, and
storage reliability at scale. Comfort working at the kernel and
filesystems level: experience with eBPF, cgroups, namespaces, or
similar Linux primitives. Track record of leading through influence
and shaping technical direction while operating as an individual
contributor. Strong communication skills, with the ability to
explain complex systems-level concepts to engineers, leadership,
and non-technical stakeholders. 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)
Keywords: Blacksmith, Meriden , Principal Systems Engineer, IT / Software / Systems , New York City, Connecticut
