Founding Recruiter

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 1,200+ companies and hit ~$10M in ARR in less than 2 years.

• We operate thousands of bare-metal machines across multiple regions, regularly schedule 30k+ 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.

What you’ll do

• Own recruiting end-to-end: sourcing, outreach, screening, interview coordination, closing, and candidate experience.

• Personally source and close senior engineers and early leaders, not just manage inbound.

• Partner closely with founders and hiring managers to:

  • Define hiring profiles and quality bar

  • Calibrate interview signal

  • Continuously improve the hiring funnel

• Build the recruiting foundation from scratch:

  • ATS setup and hygiene

  • Interview loops and scorecards

  • Funnel metrics and reporting

  • Interviewer enablement and training

• Create a world-class candidate experience that reflects Blacksmith’s culture, technical depth, and ambition.

• Act as a force multiplier for the founding team by removing hiring friction and increasing velocity without sacrificing quality.

• Over time, help scale and lead the recruiting function as the company grows.

• Have significant experience recruiting for technical roles in high-growth environments (startup or top-tier tech company).

• Have personally sourced and closed senior engineers and/or early leaders. You’re comfortable owning the hardest searches yourself.

• Are highly resourceful and thrive in ambiguity. You can operate without much structure and build it as you go.

• Care deeply about quality, bar raising, and building durable teams, not just filling roles quickly.

• Think in systems and enjoy building processes that scale (funnels, tooling, metrics, interview design).

• Are a strong communicator and trusted partner to founders and hiring managers.

• Have strong judgment and can push back constructively when quality or priorities are misaligned.

• Are excited about being early at a company and growing into larger ownership over time.

• Enjoy working in person 5 days a week in San Francisco / NYC (exceptional candidates may be considered for hybrid).

Compensation and benefits

• Competitive base + equity.

• Medical, Vision, and Dental insurance.

• Unlimited PTO.

• Annual offsite.

• Early-exercise stock options

• 12 weeks fully paid parental leave (US)