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About the Role

As an Account Executive, Startups, you will own Blacksmith's new business acquisition within the early-stage startup market, focusing on YC companies and the broader venture-backed ecosystem. This high-velocity hunter role involves building pipeline, cultivating relationships with founders and engineering leaders, and closing a high volume of new customers, while also contributing to the development of a repeatable go-to-market strategy for the startup segment.

Responsibilities

Own the startup ecosystem and build and manage a territory of high-growth, venture-backed startups.
Develop deep relationships within the YC ecosystem and the broader startup community.
Identify promising companies early and build relationships before infrastructure decisions are finalized.
Serve as a trusted resource for founders and engineering leaders on CI, developer infrastructure, and scaling.
Generate pipeline through targeted outbound efforts, referrals, events, founder networks, VC relationships, and creative prospecting.
Utilize signals such as funding, hiring, GitHub activity, and engineering growth to identify engagement opportunities.
Build relationships with accelerators, investors, founders, and other key ecosystem players.
Engage companies creatively rather than relying solely on high-volume outbound.
Work directly with founders, CTOs, engineering leaders, and developers to understand their workflows.
Facilitate rapid evaluation and adoption of Blacksmith.
Execute fast, lightweight sales cycles tailored to startup purchasing behavior.
Identify companies with significant growth potential to become major Blacksmith customers.
Cultivate relationships that can scale from initial teams to company-wide adoption.
Develop a strong understanding of CI/CD, GitHub Actions, cloud infrastructure, developer workflows, and cloud economics.
Collaborate with Solutions Engineers for deeper technical discovery and evaluations.
Understand startup software development and shipping processes to identify areas for developer velocity improvement.
Translate improvements in speed, reliability, and cost into a clear value proposition.
Contribute to building the startup go-to-market motion.
Develop a strategic point of view for Blacksmith's success in the startup market.
Help shape YC, accelerator, and venture ecosystem programs.
Identify patterns in fast-growing customers to create repeatable acquisition plays.
Provide direct feedback from founders and developers to product and engineering teams.
Experiment quickly, measure results, and scale successful acquisition motions.

Requirements

1+ years of quota-carrying sales experience, preferably in developer tools, infrastructure, cloud services, or technical SaaS.
Understanding of startup operations and the decision-making processes of founders and engineering leaders.
Proven ability to identify promising companies and engage them early.
Capacity to manage a high volume of opportunities while maintaining follow-through and customer experience.
Comfortable selling directly to founders, CTOs, and engineers.
Technical curiosity and a willingness to understand product functionality.
Ability to move quickly and adapt sales processes for motivated customers.
Creative approach to pipeline generation beyond standard sequences and cold outbound.
Desire to build a go-to-market motion rather than inherit an existing one.

Skills

Sales
Business Development
Relationship Building
Pipeline Generation
Prospecting
Outbound Sales
Technical Sales
CI/CD
GitHub Actions
Cloud Infrastructure
Developer Workflows
Cloud Economics
Startup Ecosystem Navigation
GTM Strategy Development

Location

Remote

Work Type

Full-time

Experience Level

1+ years of quota-carrying sales experience
Experience selling developer tools, infrastructure, cloud services, or technical SaaS
Experience selling into Seed through Series B companies
Experience building startup, emerging, or SMB sales motions
Experience building a territory, community, or ecosystem from scratch

Salary/Compensations

Competitive base salary and uncapped commission

Benefits

Meaningful equity
Medical, dental, and vision insurance
401(k) match
Unlimited PTO
Early-exercise stock options
12 weeks of fully paid parental leave in the U.S.
Annual company offsite

About the Company

Blacksmith started by building infrastructure to run CI workloads efficiently, with their first product accelerating GitHub Actions using a global fleet of bare-metal machines.
The company currently orchestrates millions of Firecracker VMs weekly, serving over 5,000 companies and achieving approximately $50M in ARR within 2.5 years, with revenue more than quintupling since early 2026.
Blacksmith operates thousands of bare-metal machines across multiple regions, concurrently schedules over 100k vCPUs, and manages a petabyte-scale Ceph cluster.
The company has secured $58.5M in funding from Seed to Series B, led by Google Ventures (GV) and Peak XV Capital.
Blacksmith was founded by a team with extensive systems and scaling expertise, including experience from Faire's search/ads infrastructure and Cockroach Labs' distributed systems operations.
The go-to-market strategy is led by Jon Boyer, formerly Head of Sales at Zapier.
Blacksmith is expanding its CI infrastructure into a broader platform, including agent sandboxes at scale and developing its own background coding agent.