Staff Systems Engineer

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