Job description

About Blacksmith

Blacksmith specializes in high-performance infrastructure for continuous integration (CI) workloads, operating a proprietary global fleet of bare-metal machines to accelerate GitHub Actions efficiently and cost-effectively. Serving over 3,000 companies, they manage tens of millions of Firecracker VMs monthly and have achieved nearly $10M in annual recurring revenue within just under two years. Their infrastructure includes thousands of bare-metal servers, concurrent vCPU scheduling exceeding 100,000, and managing a petabyte-scale Ceph cluster. The company has raised $13.5M across Seed and Series A rounds led by Google Ventures and is focused on assembling a small, expert team. Founders bring strong backgrounds in scaling distributed systems, with sales led by an experienced executive from Zapier, while expanding the CI platform into broader sandbox-based agent services and coding tools.

Role Overview

The Head of Capacity will oversee rapid infrastructure growth by forecasting demand and planning capacity to ensure uninterrupted service. Collaborating with founders and infrastructure teams, this role focuses on managing hardware procurement, supplier relationships, and expansion strategies to maintain scalability ahead of customer needs.

Key Responsibilities

Lead comprehensive capacity management across compute, storage, networking, and datacenter resources.
Develop and maintain forecasting models predicting infrastructure demand and growth trajectories.
Work alongside engineering to assess future workload demands.
Formulate deployment strategies across multiple geographies and datacenter providers.
Manage vendor and datacenter partnerships to secure necessary infrastructure supplies.
Direct hardware purchasing and infrastructure scaling initiatives.
Evaluate potential new hardware platforms and supplier relationships.
Monitor resource utilization to optimize infrastructure investments.
Create scalable processes and systems enabling expansion from thousands to multiple times that scale.

Candidate Profile

Proven experience managing large-scale infrastructure environments including cloud, hosting, networking, or datacenters.
Strong skills in capacity planning, forecasting, and operational execution.
Ability to juggle long-term strategic initiatives with daily operational challenges.
Excellent analytical capabilities and comfort in decision-making under uncertain conditions.
Effective in vendor negotiations and managing supplier relationships.
Adept at communicating with both technical teams and business leadership.
Passionate about solving challenges related to operations at scale.
Eager to work onsite full-time in New York City or San Francisco, collaborating directly with founders.

Preferred Qualifications

Background at hyperscale cloud providers, hosting companies, CDNs, or infrastructure startups.
Experience with procurement of servers, networking, storage, and datacenter capacity.
Knowledge of infrastructure supply chain management.
Understanding of power management, datacenter operations, and colocation providers.
Experience leading infrastructure scaling during phases of rapid growth.

Success Metrics in First Year

Establish a transparent, data-driven capacity planning process.
Accurately forecast infrastructure growth quarters ahead of customer demand.
Achieve predictable timelines for hardware procurement and deployment.
Build strong, scalable vendor and datacenter relationships.
Provide leadership with advance insight into potential capacity limitations before they become operational issues.
Enable Blacksmith to scale infrastructure confidently without supply or planning bottlenecks.

Compensation and Benefits

Comprehensive medical, vision, and dental insurance coverage.
Competitive salary combined with equity participation.
401(k) retirement matching program.
Unlimited paid time off policy.
Annual company retreat.
Opportunities for early exercise of stock options.
Twelve weeks fully paid parental leave within the U.S.

Head of Capacity

Where you'll work