Founding Recruiter

Overview
At Blacksmith, we provide cloud infra to help companies run their CI (GitHub Actions) substantially faster and cheaper. Our mission is to build a CI cloud. Our bet is that CI, as a class of workloads, is ready to be unbundled from the hyperscaler clouds (AWS/GCP/Azure). This is a bold statement, and we have an ambitious roadmap ahead.

Some things we're proud of

• We orchestrate millions of VMs for CI jobs each month over our own fleet of bare-metal hardware.

• We power CI for 600+ fast-growing startups like Ashby, Slope, AtoB, Pylon, Superblocks, and Finch.

• Founders: Aditya Maru and Aayush Shah were early systems engineers at Cockroach Labs. Aditya (JP) Jayaprakash worked on search infra and was later a founding member of the ads team at Faire.

• We went through Y Combinator's W24 batch and raised our seed round from Google Ventures.

• We're growing extremely fast and hit $1m ARR with a team of just 4 in less than 12 months.

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.

• Quarterly offsite.

• Early-exercise stock options

• 12 weeks fully paid parental leave (US)