Staff Systems Engineer
Summary
Staff-level systems engineer at Blacksmith (on-site in New York) who owns the architecture of large-scale bare-metal infrastructure orchestrating millions of Firecracker VMs, works at the kernel and filesystem level (Linux, eBPF, cgroups, Ceph), and mentors senior engineers while the company triples compute capacity.
Staff Systems Engineer
Company: Confidential — venture-backed technology company
Location: New York, NY (on-site; relocation assistance for exceptional candidates)
Compensation: $280,000 - $380,000 + competitive equity
Employment Type: Full-time
Visa Sponsorship: Visa transfers only (must hold a transferable US work visa)
About the Company
The client started by making CI workloads run much faster: its first product runs GitHub Actions substantially faster and cheaper on its own global fleet of bare-metal machines instead of rented cloud VMs. It now orchestrates tens of millions of Firecracker VMs a month for 3,000+ companies, schedules 100k+ vCPUs concurrently, and runs a petabyte-scale Ceph cluster it manages itself.
The client reached about $10M ARR in under two years, has grown revenue more than 5x since the start of 2026, and has raised $58.5M through its Series B.
The Role
The client is hiring a Staff-level systems engineer with deep experience building and operating large-scale distributed infrastructure. You will work at the kernel level with bare-metal machines, virtualization and distributed storage, own the architecture of critical platforms, and change the technical direction of the team as a senior IC while the client triples its compute capacity.
What You Will Do
- Own the architecture of infrastructure platforms that orchestrate tens of millions of Firecracker VMs a month across a global bare-metal fleet.
- Own production outcomes (reliability, performance, operational excellence) as compute capacity triples.
- Translate business and product strategy into long-term technical roadmaps with the technical co-founders.
- Build at the kernel and filesystem level with eBPF, cgroups, namespaces and low-level I/O tuning to optimize performance at petabyte scale.
- Lead complex infrastructure initiatives from problem definition through delivery.
- Mentor senior engineers and raise engineering standards.
What You Bring
- 8+ years in low-level systems or distributed infrastructure engineering
- Built and owned large-scale distributed systems at recognized, prestigious organizations
- Staff/Principal-level IC who materially changed a team's technical direction
- Low-level systems work (kernel, filesystems, Linux primitives): building the substrate, not building on managed cloud
- Startup or high-growth scale-up experience with small teams
- Solid tenure with clearly delivered impact
- Mastery of AI coding agents in your workflow
Nice to Have
- Systems programming in Go, Rust or C/C++
- Virtualization (Firecracker, QEMU, Cloud Hypervisor)
- Distributed storage at scale (e.g. Ceph)
- Publications, patents or conference talks
Interview Process
Recruiter screen (30 min), two systems technical interviews (1 hour each), on-site day, final chat with the CEO (30 min).
Tech Stack
Go, Rust, C, Firecracker, QEMU, Cloud Hypervisor, Ceph, Linux, eBPF, cgroups, namespaces, bare-metal infrastructure, GitHub Actions
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