Staff Systems Engineer
Full-time
On-site
New York City, NY
$280K - $380K
Role highlights
Intake call
Requirements
Pipeline
About this role
What to ask
Interview process
Ideal candidates
Rejected feedback
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Ryan Wilson
Ryan Wilson
Founding Recruiter
Less engaged
Bottom 30% of hiring managers
Time to first action
4 days
Reply time
7 hours
Active days
3 days
Feedback quality
Clear
Role highlights
Hiring goal
1 - 5 candidates
Recruiter activity
Recruiter activity on this role is medium
Why candidates should join
Rocket-ship growth at real scale: Blacksmith hit ~$10M ARR in under 2 years and has tripled revenue since early 2026. They orchestrate tens of millions of Firecracker VMs monthly and schedule 100k+ vCPUs concurrently. You're not joining a company that's "planning to scale" — they're already there and tripling capacity in weeks.
Elite engineering team: The team is intentionally small (~9 engineers today) but world-class. Recent hires include a founding engineer from Cockroach Labs (whose company was acquired by Datadog) and the team lead for Google's Colossus project (exabyte-scale distributed file system). You'd be working alongside people who've built some of the most complex infrastructure systems in the world.
Massive technical scope as an IC: You'll own architectural direction for critical infrastructure — bare-metal fleet management, petabyte-scale Ceph clusters, Firecracker VM orchestration — reporting directly to the technical co-founders. No layers of management between you and impact.
Expanding platform beyond CI: Blacksmith is extending into running agent sandboxes at scale and building their own background coding agent. You'd help shape the next generation of the platform — not just maintain what exists.
Backed by top investors with strong comp: $13.5M raised across Seed and Series A led by Google Ventures (GV) plus a recent $45M venture round. Compensation is $280K–$380K base + seven-figure equity packages (early-exercise stock options). Founded by engineers from Cockroach Labs and Faire with GTM led by the former Head of Sales at Zapier.
Cutting-edge AI-native engineering culture: The best engineers here orchestrate 5-7 AI coding agents in autonomous loops. They've built their own background coding agent. This is a team pushing the frontier of how software gets built.
Suggested outreach
Intake call
Recorded by Parascribe
Company Overview
Blacksmith is a fast-growing startup, focusing on selective hiring for specific infrastructure needs.
The team is relatively small, with plans to expand significantly by the end of the year.
Role Requirements
Hiring for a Staff Systems Engineer to support significant infrastructure scaling.
Looking for 1 to 5 hires, focusing on senior individual contributors.
Candidate Requirements
Must have experience in low-level systems; tech stack agnostic but requires mastery in orchestrating AI agents.
Preferred candidates from prestigious organizations with a track record of significant impact.
Compensation and Benefits
Salary range: $280,000 to $380,000, with flexibility for exceptional candidates.
Competitive equity offerings, potentially valued in seven figures.
Work Arrangement and Logistics
Relocation assistance available for high-caliber candidates; visa transfers possible but no new visa sponsorships.
Ideal Candidate Profile
Background in early-stage startups or prestigious tech companies, with a strong history of building impactful systems.
Red flags include frequent job changes without clear reasons and primarily DevOps/SRE backgrounds.
Interview Process
Initial screen with Ryan, followed by three technical interviews and an in-person session with the team and founders.
Exceptional candidates receive an additional early-stage founder conversation.
Pain Points and Hiring Motivation
Significant scaling of infrastructure necessitates hiring; current infrastructure runs over 22 million CI jobs weekly.
Looking to triple infrastructure capacity to support big enterprise customers.
Technical Requirements
Experience with low-level languages like Go, Rust, or C; must excel in AI agent orchestration.
Tech stack is secondary; focus is on ability to integrate and manage complex systems.
Requirements
By tier
By category
Calibrate a candidate in Parabot. to see how well they fit the requirements.
Dealbreaker
Work experience
Built and owned large-scale distributed systems at recognized, prestigious organizations
Updated
Staff/Principal-level IC who materially changed the direction and trajectory of an engineering team
Updated
Hard skills
Low-level systems engineering (kernel, filesystems, Linux primitives) — must be building the substrate, not building on top of managed cloud
Updated
Baseline
Seniority
8+ years of experience in low-level systems or distributed infrastructure engineering
Work experience
Sufficient tenure at previous roles demonstrating clear, delivered impact (not short stints without results)
Updated
Has worked at a startup or high-growth scale-up — comfortable with small teams and no supporting org
Updated
Hard skills
Mastery of AI coding agents for development workflows
Updated
Nice-to-have
Work experience
Technical thought leadership: publications, patents, or conference speaking
Updated
Hard skills
Systems programming in Go, Rust, or C/C++
Updated
Virtualization technologies (Firecracker, QEMU, or Cloud Hypervisor)
Updated
Distributed storage systems at scale (e.g., Ceph)
Updated
Traits to avoid
DevOps/SRE/Kubernetes-platform profile — operates or orchestrates infrastructure rather than building the low-level systems underneath it
Updated
Job-hopper with short tenures and no demonstrated delivered impact
Updated
Pipeline
Inbox
1candidate
Recruiter Screen - 30 minutes
3candidates
Technical Interview 1 - Logical Systems Questions - 1 hour
0candidates
Technical Interview 2 - Logical Systems Questions - 1 hour
2candidates
On-Site Day - Full day
0candidates
CEO Final Chat - 30 minutes
1candidate
Offer
0candidates
Hired
0candidates
Recent Activity
Changed status of Candidate #3 from Submitted to Final round
11 days ago
Changed status of Candidate #2 from Submitted to Rejected
13 days ago
Changed status of Candidate #1 from Submitted to Rejected
13 days ago
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
Role details
Salary
$280K - $380K
On-site work policy
On-site in New York City. Relocation assistance available for exceptional candidates.
Full-time position
Location
New York City, NY
Equity
Competitive equity
Visa sponsorship details
Open to visa transfers (e.g. OPT, H1B transfers)
Additional visa sponsorship details
Blacksmith can do visa transfers but cannot sponsor new visas due to processing timelines. Candidates must already hold a valid US work visa that can be transferred.
Hiring Count
Looking to hire 1 - 5 candidates for this role
Tech stack
Go, Rust, C, Firecracker, QEMU, Cloud Hypervisor, Ceph, Linux, eBPF, cgroups, namespaces, Bare-metal infrastructure, Distributed systems, GitHub Actions
What to ask candidates
Can the candidate be on-site? If not, is the candidate willing to relocate?
What is their salary expectation?
How actively is this candidate exploring new opportunities?
Requirements
By tier
By category
Calibrate a candidate in Parabot. to see how well they fit the requirements.
Dealbreaker
Work experience
Built and owned large-scale distributed systems at recognized, prestigious organizations
Updated
Staff/Principal-level IC who materially changed the direction and trajectory of an engineering team
Updated
Hard skills
Low-level systems engineering (kernel, filesystems, Linux primitives) — must be building the substrate, not building on top of managed cloud
Updated
Baseline
Seniority
8+ years of experience in low-level systems or distributed infrastructure engineering
Work experience
Sufficient tenure at previous roles demonstrating clear, delivered impact (not short stints without results)
Updated
Has worked at a startup or high-growth scale-up — comfortable with small teams and no supporting org
Updated
Hard skills
Mastery of AI coding agents for development workflows
Updated
Nice-to-have
Work experience
Technical thought leadership: publications, patents, or conference speaking
Updated
Hard skills
Systems programming in Go, Rust, or C/C++
Updated
Virtualization technologies (Firecracker, QEMU, or Cloud Hypervisor)
Updated
Distributed storage systems at scale (e.g., Ceph)
Updated
Traits to avoid
DevOps/SRE/Kubernetes-platform profile — operates or orchestrates infrastructure rather than building the low-level systems underneath it
Updated
Job-hopper with short tenures and no demonstrated delivered impact
