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Blacksmith

Bare-metal CI runners for GitHub Actions

Technical Support Engineer

Full-TimeUpdated on 10/23/2026
$160k - $180k/yr+ Equity + 401(k) match + Early-exercise stock options
Mid
San Francisco, CA, USA+1 moreMore locations: New York, NY, USA
In Person
Customer Experience & SupportCustomer Support

About the job

Requirements
  • Have experience as an early Technical Support Engineer at a growth-stage business.
  • Have experience supporting customers on a highly technical product.
  • Ideally have experience with large-scale distributed systems.
  • Have experience setting up AI/agent-native workflows.
  • Be comfortable with Claude skills and MCP/CLI-based tooling, and have created AI-native leverage in current or previous roles.
  • Be able to build robust, scalable processes and automate manual tasks to create leverage for the broader support team.
  • Take a customer-first approach and work to resolve customer issues.
  • Enjoy cross-functional work and want to represent the customer internally.
Responsibilities
  • Work with customers and the pre-sales team to diagnose and resolve complex technical issues.
  • Develop a deep technical understanding of the product and its technologies.
  • Identify trends and patterns in customer issues, suggest product improvements, and provide customer feedback to internal teams.
  • Reproduce technical issues and work with the engineering team to resolve them.
  • Develop tools, processes, and automations for diagnosing issues and optimizing service performance.
  • Collaborate cross-functionally to create a strong product experience for customers.
  • Build the foundations for Technical Support Engineering best practices, with a view to building a team in the future.
Desired Qualifications
  • Experience with large-scale distributed systems.

About the company

Blacksmith provides a drop-in replacement for GitHub Actions runners, running CI on high-performance bare-metal CPUs instead of rented hyperscaler VMs. It integrates with GitHub Actions as a replaceable runner option, delivering faster builds and lower compute costs while adding test analytics and observability for Actions workflows. Its approach uses physical, gaming-grade hardware rather than cloud VMs to offer more predictable performance and clearer cost, helping teams manage AI-assisted build demand. The company’s goal is to scale its CI platform to meet growing demand, expand its customer base, and fund hardware-scale infrastructure to support increasing build needs.

Company Size

51-200

Company Stage

Series C

Total Funding

$124.6M

Headquarters

San Francisco, California

Founded

2024

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Simplify Jobs

Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • CI jobs grew 5% to 10% weekly in 2026, signaling sustained usage growth.
  • More than 6,000 companies use Blacksmith, including Supabase, Clerk, Ashby, and Mercury.
  • Blacksmith plans a tenfold compute expansion, matching AI coding demand from 2026.

What critics are saying

  • July 21, 2026 control-plane degradation exposed uptime fragility in Blacksmith's core product.
  • August 13, 2026 US-west cooling loss proved single-facility dependence can halt customer builds.
  • Microsoft bundles GitHub Actions into GitHub, crushing standalone runner vendors by 2027.

What makes Blacksmith unique

  • Blacksmith runs GitHub Actions on bare-metal CPUs, delivering faster CI and lower costs.
  • Codesmith, launched in 2026, fixes CI failures inside the validation loop.
  • Peak XV's August 2026 Series B validated demand from 6,000-plus customers.

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Benefits

  • Health Insurance
  • Dental Insurance
  • Vision Insurance
  • Unlimited Paid Time Off
  • Company Equity
  • Stock Options
  • Parental Leave

Growth & Insights and Company News

6 month growth

7%

1 year growth

0%

2 year growth

21%
PR Newswire
Oct 21st, 2026
Blacksmith raises sequoia-led Series C at $1 billion valuation to scale code validation.

Blacksmith raises sequoia-led Series C at $1 billion valuation to scale code validation. Oct 21, 2026, 09:15 ET Company's ARR grew 17x since January, with more than 10,000 startups and enterprise companies running builds and tests on its platform. SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ - Blacksmith, the infrastructure platform for building and testing code, today announced a $66M Series C led by Sequoia Capital at a $1 billion valuation, with participation from Premji Invest and existing investors Peak XV Partners, GV and Y Combinator. The round brings Blacksmith's total funding to $125 million and will enable the company to grow its team and expand its compute footprint. For years, writing code was the slow part of shipping software. With AI coding agents now producing a large and growing share of the world's code, the burden has changed from writing code to validating it. Every change still has to be built and tested before it can be merged, a step known as continuous integration, or CI. Most companies run CI on general-purpose cloud infrastructure that was never designed for it. As developers push more code, teams hit longer waits for compute, slower builds on older-generation CPUs, and a constant fight between over- and under-provisioning. Anthropic reported last month that its own CI volume grew 25x in six months as Claude took over most of its code output. "Since Claude Code took off in March, almost every conversation we've had with a large engineering team has started the same way. Developers who used to push three or four pull requests a day are now pushing orders of magnitude more and their CI infrastructure can't keep up. We're grateful to our customers who are trusting us to solve this bottleneck, and excited to partner with Sequoia to solve it at scale," said Aditya "JP" Jayaprakash, co-founder and CEO of Blacksmith. CI is the most variable workload a company runs: a single customer's demand regularly jumps from zero to tens of thousands of CPUs and back again. Blacksmith has designed every part of its infrastructure stack to absorb those spikes as a matter of routine. Customers switch with a one-line change to their workflow file and never provision, scale or maintain their CI infrastructure again. Developers using Blacksmith see their CI jobs complete twice as fast and at 60% lower cost on average, with zero operational overhead. Since January, the number of CI jobs running on Blacksmith each week has grown from 5 million to more than 90 million, and annual recurring revenue has grown 17x. "JP and team understood early that as AI agents wrote more code, the infrastructure to build and test it would need to change," said Isaiah Boone, Partner at Sequoia Capital. "What stood out to us was their deep systems expertise and speed of execution. That has translated into a product that helps their customers test and ship their software faster. We believe that foundation gives Blacksmith room to build much more as the demands of software development change." Blacksmith was founded in 2024 by Jayaprakash, Aayush Shah and Aditya Maru, who met as undergraduates at the University of Waterloo. Shah and Maru were early engineers at Cockroach Labs, and Jayaprakash was an engineer at Faire. All three are developers who have run spiky, large-scale infrastructure before, and they built Blacksmith on the bet that testing code, not writing it, would become the constraint on shipping software. More than 10,000 companies, including Ashby, Granola, Handshake and LangChain, now run their CI on Blacksmith. The company manages nearly 10 MW of compute across data centers in the United States and Europe and is on track to grow that footprint at least 5x in 2027. "Blacksmith has significantly reduced the burden of managing our CI runners while cutting our runner costs by roughly 40%, and that doesn't even account for the engineering time we've saved," said Joaquin Borggio, Infrastructure Engineer at LangChain. To learn more or move your CI to Blacksmith, visit blacksmith.sh. Blacksmith is hiring engineers in New York and San Francisco at blacksmith.sh/careers. Follow Blacksmith on LinkedIn and X. About Blacksmith Blacksmith is the infrastructure platform for building and testing code. Companies bring Blacksmith their builds and tests, and Blacksmith runs them twice as fast and at 60% lower cost on average, on infrastructure purpose-built for CI workloads. More than 10,000 companies, including Ashby, Granola, Handshake and LangChain, run their CI on Blacksmith. The company was founded in 2024 by Aditya (JP) Jayaprakash, Aayush Shah and Aditya Maru and is backed by Sequoia Capital, Premji Invest, Peak XV Partners, GV and Y Combinator. For more information, visit blacksmith.sh. SOURCE Blacksmith

UA.NEWS
Oct 21st, 2026
Blacksmith raises $66M at $1B valuation as AI coding boom drives testing demand

Blacksmith, a startup that provides infrastructure for testing software code before deployment, has raised $66 million in a Series C round led by Sequoia Capital. The round values the company at $1 billion, Fortune reports. About two months ago, Blacksmith raised $45 million in a Series B round led by Peak XV Partners, at a $550 million valuation. Total funding is about $124.5 million. Founded in 2024, the company offers continuous integration tools. More than 10,000 companies now use it, up from about 5,000 in August, including Granola, Handshake, Supabase, and LangChain. Weekly checks have grown from 5 million to 90 million this year. Most of the new money will go toward buying servers for data centres. Blacksmith has about 40 employees and plans to reach about 75 by year-end.

Crypto Briefing
Oct 21st, 2026
Blacksmith hits $1 billion valuation after $66 million Series C led by Sequoia

Blacksmith hits $1 billion valuation after $66 million Series C led by Sequoia. The code-testing startup nearly doubled its valuation in about two months as AI-generated code floods developer pipelines 15 hours ago Sponsored: Vera - AI-powered prediction market intelligence, built for serious analysts Explore Vera Blacksmith, a startup that runs the machinery companies use to test their code before release, is now worth $1 billion. The new mark comes from a $66 million Series C round led by Sequoia Capital. According to Fortune, the round lands about two months after Blacksmith raised a $45 million Series B at a $550 million valuation. The round, by the numbers. The Series C pushes Blacksmith's total funding to about $124.5 million, according to Fortune. Separate research findings put the exact Series C amount at approximately $66.26 million. Sequoia led this round. The earlier Series B was led by Peak XV Partners, with GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Y Combinator also participating. Before the Series C, the company had raised a total of approximately $58.5 million. The valuation trajectory is steep. Blacksmith sat at roughly $60 million after its Series A, then jumped to $550 million with the Series B. The latest round nearly doubles that figure. The underlying business metrics help explain the enthusiasm. Revenue has climbed from the early single-digit millions to the tens of millions, per the research findings. Some enterprise customers now spend more than $1 million a year with the company. The customer base has grown from approximately 700 to 800 in late 2025 to somewhere between 5,000 and 6,000 or more. Named customers include Supabase and Expensify. Headcount, meanwhile, went from about 10 employees to about 30. AI, tech, and the markets they move - in one daily briefing. Daily. Free. Join 34,000+ readers across crypto, finance, and policy. What Blacksmith actually does. Every time a developer submits a change, automated tests run to make sure nothing breaks. Those tests need computing power to run on, and the machines that execute them are called runners. Blacksmith sells high-performance cloud runners plus caching tools designed specifically for these CI workloads. The company positions itself as a quicker, cheaper alternative to running those jobs on GitHub Actions, the default automation tool for many developers using GitHub. Blacksmith was founded in 2024 in San Francisco by Aditya (JP) Jayaprakash, who serves as CEO, along with Aayush Shah and Aditya Maru. The trio came through Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch. They started with bare-metal CI runners for GitHub Actions, meaning dedicated physical servers rather than shared virtual machines. The company has since expanded into AI-assisted tooling. Its Codesmith coding agent automatically diagnoses failed code checks and attempts to fix them. The AI coding boom is a testing boom. According to the research findings, CI job volume on Blacksmith has grown by 5% to 10% every week since early 2026, tracking the rise in AI coding adoption. What this means for developers, investors, and rivals. Competition is another factor to watch. Blacksmith's pitch is built around being faster and cheaper than GitHub Actions' own runners. That makes its fortunes partly tied to how a much larger platform chooses to price and improve its own offering. The Codesmith agent suggests the company sees that risk and wants to move up the value chain. Selling raw compute for tests is useful. Selling software that understands why tests fail and fixes them is stickier, and potentially harder for a platform owner to replicate quickly. Disclosure: This article was edited by Diego Almada Lopez. For more information on how Cryptobriefing create and review content, see its Editorial Policy.

Crypto.com
Oct 21st, 2026
Blacksmith hits $1 billion valuation after $66 million Series C led by Sequoia.

Blacksmith hits $1 billion valuation after $66 million Series C led by Sequoia. News Wed, 21 Oct 2026 11:12:58 UTC 14 hours ago Blacksmith's rapid growth and AI integration highlight a shift towards more efficient, automated code testing, impacting developer workflows and market competition. This content is automatically aggregated. Full credit goes to the original publisher (cryptobriefing.com).

Business Matters Magazine
Aug 17th, 2026
Blacksmith Series B raises $45 mn led by Peak XV at $550 mn valuation.

Blacksmith Series B raises $45 mn led by Peak XV at $550 mn valuation. By Tanu August 17, 2026 4 Mins Read Blacksmith Series B has raised $45 million in fresh funding led by Peak XV Partners, valuing the San Francisco-based AI developer infrastructure startup at around $550 million. Existing backers Google Ventures (GV) and Y Combinator also participated in the round. The financing was completed in March 2026 but has been disclosed only now. With the latest investment, Blacksmith's total funding has reached approximately $58.5 million. The company plans to use a substantial share of the new capital to expand its computing capacity as demand rises for infrastructure that can test, validate and ship software generated with the help of artificial intelligence. Blacksmith targets rising AI code testing demand. Blacksmith operates in the continuous integration (CI) segment, helping engineering teams automatically build and test software before it moves further through the development process. The company was founded in 2024 by Aditya Jayaprakash, Aditya Maru and Aayush Shah. Its business has increasingly shifted toward supporting development workflows in which AI systems themselves generate and modify code. As AI coding tools become more capable, developers can produce software changes at a much faster pace. That increases the amount of code that needs to be tested and reviewed before deployment, creating additional pressure on existing CI infrastructure. Blacksmith said the number of CI jobs processed through its platform has been increasing by roughly 5% to 10% week-on-week since the beginning of 2026. The startup now serves more than 6,000 companies, with customers including Supabase, Clerk, Ashby and Mercury. Fresh capital to expand computing infrastructure. A major priority for the Blacksmith Series B proceeds will be increasing the company's computing footprint. Blacksmith currently manages hundreds of thousands of CPU cores and intends to expand that capacity by roughly 10 times in the coming months. The investment comes as the company prepares for a much larger volume of software testing workloads generated by AI-assisted development. Blacksmith argues that conventional CI infrastructure could face capacity and performance constraints as AI coding agents generate more pull requests and software changes. The company is therefore building infrastructure specifically designed around the speed and scale required by modern software development teams. Startup expands beyond traditional CI workflows. Blacksmith has also broadened its product offering beyond automated testing. Its recently introduced Code Smith is a cloud-based coding agent designed to work on software development tasks, including building features, fixing bugs and investigating CI failures. The company is also developing CodeSmith Quality Assurance, which is intended to automatically test code changes before they are merged. The broader strategy is to make the development cycle more automated, allowing both human developers and AI agents to move from writing code to validation and deployment more quickly. Blacksmith has positioned its infrastructure against established developer platforms such as GitHub Actions, CircleCI, Buildkite, Depot and Namespace. The startup claims its purpose-built CI cloud can execute workloads up to twice as quickly and reduce costs by 50% to 75% compared with GitHub-hosted runners. Blacksmith's own engineering updates also highlight the growing pressure AI-generated code is placing on continuous integration systems. Blacksmith's engineering blog Peak XV deepens US AI investment push. The Blacksmith Series B investment also highlights Peak XV Partners' expanding focus on US-based technology startups. The venture capital firm has been building its presence in the US since becoming an independent firm following the 2023 separation from Sequoia Capital. Its US portfolio includes AI and developer-focused companies such as Vapi, Mem0, Hyperbound and PostHog. Peak XV's official portfolio also lists Blacksmith among its investments, reflecting the firm's broader interest in developer infrastructure and AI-focused businesses. In February 2026, Peak XV announced $1.3 billion in new capital commitments across its India Seed, India Venture and APAC funds, underlining its continued investment activity across technology markets. The Blacksmith investment comes as AI increasingly changes the economics and workflow of software development. For the startup, the next phase will centre on scaling its infrastructure while expanding tools that allow AI-generated code to be tested and merged with less manual intervention. For more business and startup funding updates, readers can also explore [Lenskart Q1 FY27 results](https://businessmatters.in/lenskart-q1-fy27-results/) and [IndiQube Q1 FY27 results](https://businessmatters.in/indiqube-q1-fy27-results/).