SECTION I · THE BRIEF
Brief #97442Updated 21 AUG 2026NEW YORK CITY, NYYcY COMBINATOR
Employbl Company Profile

Staff Product Engineer

Blacksmith is a company that helps businesses to conduct their continuous integration (CI) up to twice as quickly and at half the expense. Blacksmith accomplish this by running CI on powerful gaming CPUs.

Location
New York City, NY
Company size
10–20
Posted
2d ago
Via
Yc
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Staff Product Engineer · Blacksmith

View company profile
Job title
Staff Product Engineer
Job location
New York City
Job listing URL
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/blacksmith/jobs/bXyKjfQ-staff-product-engineer
Job description
**About Blacksmith** - We started by building infrastructure to run CI workloads really fast. Our first product helps companies run GitHub Actions substantially faster and cheaper by owning and operating our own global fleet of bare-metal machines rather than renting generic cloud VMs. - Today, we orchestrate tens of millions of Firecracker VMs each month, running CI for 3,000+ companies and hit ~$10M in ARR in less than 2 years. We’ve more than tripled revenue since the start of 2026. - We operate thousands of bare-metal machines across multiple regions, regularly schedule 100k+ vCPUs concurrently, and run a petabyte-scale Ceph cluster that we manage ourselves. - We’ve raised $13.5M across Seed and Series A, led by Google Ventures (GV), and we’re intentionally building a small, but exceptional team. - Blacksmith was founded by a team with deep systems and scaling experience, including building search/ads infrastructure at Faire, and operating large distributed systems at Cockroach Labs. Our GTM is led by Jon Boyer, formerly Head of Sales at Zapier. - We’re now extending the same CI infrastructure into a broader platform: running agent sandboxes at scale and building our own background coding agent on top of it. **The Staff Product Engineer at Blacksmith** We are looking for a Staff Product Engineer to set the technical direction for our new product(s). This role operates at the organization level, owning architecture, solving complex product problems, and driving 0-1 product initiatives that shape how Blacksmith grows and continues to excite our customers. You will be one of the key technical authorities and a force multiplier at Blacksmith. You’ll raise engineering standards across the team, mentor senior talent and own production outcomes. This is a high impact, hands-on technical leader role. **What you’ll be doing** - Own and drive the architectural direction for our new product(s). These new products don’t exist in the industry today. You will be designing and building the next generation of AI native developer tooling. - Translate business and product strategy into long-term technical roadmaps and execution plans. - Drive the development of these products from 0-1. - 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. **You’re a good fit if you have** - Expertise in building products that customers love. You’ll have come from a background where you have set and led the technical direction of a product from an early stage and developed that product through to one which is recognized industry wide as delivering an exceptional customer experience. - Are a power user of coding agents. Our team embodies the ethos of a team that builds background agents. We operate at the forefront of agentic development and have built a best in class standard for agentic coding. You will help us further leverage these tools. - 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 technical concepts to engineers, leadership, and non-technical stakeholders. **Compensation and benefits** - Medical, Vision, and Dental insurance. - Competitive base + equity. - 401K match. - Unlimited PTO. - Annual offsite. - Early-exercise stock options - Unlimited agent tokens - 12 weeks fully paid parental leave (US)
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Where this role is based

New York City, NY

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Blacksmith headquarters

Ventura, CA

Company size

10–20 employees

Founded

2024

Total raised

$14,000,000

View company profile ↗

Funding rounds

  • Series B$45M
  • Series A$10M
  • Seed$3.5M
  • Pre Seed$500K