Brand Designer

About Blacksmith

Blacksmith builds advanced infrastructure to accelerate continuous integration (CI) workloads by operating a global network of custom bare-metal machines, significantly outperforming traditional cloud-based VMs. Their primary product enables companies to run GitHub Actions faster and at lower costs. Currently, Blacksmith manages tens of millions of Firecracker virtual machines weekly, supporting over 5,000 clients with rapid growth reflected by approximately $50 million in annual recurring revenue as of early 2026 and a more than fivefold revenue increase since then. The technical backbone includes thousands of bare-metal servers distributed across multiple regions, orchestrating over 100,000 vCPUs simultaneously, alongside a massive self-managed petabyte-scale Ceph storage cluster. The company has raised $58.5 million through rounds led by Google Ventures and Peak XV Partners, maintaining a small yet highly skilled team. Founders bring extensive systems and scaling experience from organizations such as Faire and Cockroach Labs, and the go-to-market strategy is spearheaded by an ex-Head of Sales from Zapier. Blacksmith plans to expand its core CI platform into a broader ecosystem featuring scalable agent sandboxes and a proprietary background coding agent.

Role Overview

As the inaugural in-house Brand Designer, you will be entrusted with developing and evolving Blacksmith's brand identity across all touchpoints, including its website, social media, events, presentation decks, and merchandise. You will not start from scratch but inherit a well-established brand system, aiming to enhance and adapt its visual and tonal presence to resonate profoundly with software engineers and technical audiences.

Key Responsibilities

• Manage the visual and verbal expression of Blacksmith's brand across every medium, ensuring consistency and engagement.
• Transform intricate technical concepts into compelling visuals that foster credibility and connection with developers.
• Create and maintain a dynamic, flexible visual system capable of supporting multiple product lines and evolving alongside new launches.
• Collaborate closely with founders and engineers to craft launch narratives and related visual assets for platforms such as Hacker News, X (formerly Twitter), and blogs.
• Adopt an agile approach to branding by shipping work rapidly and iterating openly to reflect product evolution.
• Elevate the quality of design work throughout the company while balancing speed and excellence.

Candidate Profile

• Highly detail-oriented with a strong sense of polish and an understanding of what builds trust among developer audiences.
• Minimum five years of professional experience in brand design, preferably within developer tools, infrastructure, or complex B2B product spaces.
• A diverse portfolio demonstrating comprehensive systems thinking and proficiency across multiple formats including web, motion graphics, print, and presentations, with emphasis on typography and layout quality.
• Proven experience in creating or significantly advancing the brand identity for technical products rather than solely implementing predefined guidelines.
• Strong communication skills, able to justify design decisions clearly and persuade both technical and executive stakeholders.
• Comfortable working in uncertain or ambiguous environments.
• Passionate about prototyping and generating multiple options for design decisions, skilled in using agentic tools to speed design workflows.

Compensation and Benefits

• Competitive salary range between $180,000 and $220,000 annually, including equity options.
• Comprehensive medical, vision, and dental insurance coverage.
• 401(k) plan with company matching contributions.
• Unlimited paid time off to support work-life balance.
• Annual company-wide offsite events to foster team cohesion.
• Early-exercise stock option capabilities.
• Fully paid parental leave for 12 weeks in the US.