Staff Systems Engineer

About the Company

Blacksmith builds infrastructure to run CI workloads faster and cheaper by operating a global fleet of bare-metal machines. They orchestrate tens of millions of Firecracker VMs monthly and manage a petabyte-scale Ceph cluster. Backed by Google Ventures (GV), the team is composed of experts from Faire and Cockroach Labs.

Responsibilities

• Own and drive the architectural direction for critical infrastructure platforms
• Translate business and product strategy into long-term technical roadmaps
• 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 to define both problems and solutions

Requirements

• Deep familiarity with virtualization technologies like Firecracker, QEMU, or Cloud Hypervisor
• Experience with distributed storage systems such as Ceph
• Strong grasp of low-level file system performance, I/O tuning, and storage reliability at scale
• Experience with Linux primitives including eBPF, cgroups, or namespaces
• Track record of leading technical direction as an individual contributor
• Strong communication skills for explaining complex systems concepts

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)