Company
Blacksmith
Annual salary
$200k – $300k/yr
Location
New York City, NY
Listed
72d ago
- Experience:
- 5+ years
- Workplace:
- In-office 5 days a week in New York City. The team values in-person collaboration and candidates should expect to work on-site daily with a small, tight-knit engineering team.
- Visa:
- Visa sponsorship available
- Equity:
- Competitive equity
On-site in New York City, NY. Visa sponsorship available.
Send us your LinkedIn and CV. If your experience fits, we'll introduce you to the recruiter filling this role.
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What you'll do
- Design, build, and scale distributed systems infrastructure that orchestrates tens of millions of Firecracker VMs monthly across a global fleet of bare-metal machines
- Take ownership of critical systems challenges as compute capacity triples, including storage, networking, and scheduling at petabyte scale
- Work closely with the technical co-founders and a small, elite engineering team to solve hard infrastructure problems from first principles
- Develop and optimize performance-critical systems using low-level languages (Go, Rust, C/C++) with a focus on efficiency, correctness, and reliability
- Lead infrastructure projects end-to-end, from design through production, that directly enable large enterprise customers and new product capabilities (agent sandboxes, background coding agents)
- Use and orchestrate AI coding agents to accelerate development velocity and push the boundaries of what's possible with autonomous engineering workflows
What you need
- We need someone with 5+ years of experience building and scaling low-level distributed systems who has delivered meaningful, zero-to-one infrastructure at a prestigious organization. You should be comfortable working in a fast-paced, early-stage startup environment (in-person 5 days/week in NYC) and have a track record of materially impacting the trajectory of engineering teams and infrastructure at scale. Bonus points if you've founded or been early at a startup that grew into a recognized leader, or have publications, patents, or conference talks to your name.
Key signals we're looking for:
Built and owned something significant at a prestigious, recognizable organization, not just managed existing infrastructure
Experience with distributed storage systems (e.g., Ceph, MinIO) or similar large-scale data systems
Strong IC who can change the direction and trajectory of the engineering team around them
Comfortable with ambiguity and building from scratch in a startup that's scaling rapidly (~$10M ARR in <2 years)
Proficient with modern AI-assisted development workflows and agent orchestration
This is NOT a DevOps/SRE role. We need someone who has built systems themselves, not just managed hyperscale infrastructure.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I apply for the Senior Systems Engineer (US) role at Blacksmith? +
Use the Apply for a referral button on this page to send us your LinkedIn and CV. If your experience fits, we'll introduce you to the recruiter filling this role. They'll email you to check you're interested, then put you forward for this job or others that suit you better. It's free.
What does this Blacksmith role pay? +
The listing gives $200k – $300k/yr.
Is this role remote? +
The listing gives the location as New York City, NY. In-office 5 days a week in New York City. The team values in-person collaboration and candidates should expect to work on-site daily with a small, tight-knit engineering team. Visa sponsorship available.
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