Staff Systems Engineer

The role

This Staff Engineer will set the technical direction for core infrastructure. You will own architecture, solve complex systems problems, and drive initiatives to ensure growth, performance, and reliability.

What you will do

• Own and drive the architectural direction for critical infrastructure platforms.
• Translate business and product strategy into long-term technical roadmaps and execution plans.
• 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 where both the problem and the solution need to be defined.

Required qualifications

• Deep familiarity with virtualization technologies such as Firecracker, QEMU, or Cloud Hypervisor, and an understanding of the tradeoffs between them.
• Experience with distributed storage systems (e.g., Ceph) and a strong grasp of low-level file system performance, I/O tuning, and storage reliability at scale.
• Comfort working at the kernel and filesystems level: experience with eBPF, cgroups, namespaces, or similar Linux primitives.
• Track record of leading through influence and shaping technical direction while operating as an individual contributor.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to explain complex systems-level concepts to engineers, leadership, and non-technical stakeholders.

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)

About the company

Blacksmith builds infrastructure to run CI workloads fast using a global fleet of bare-metal machines. The company orchestrates tens of millions of Firecracker VMs each week and has raised $125M from Sequoia, Google Ventures (GV) & Peak XV Partners.