Brand Designer
At a glance
Mid-level Brand Marketing role at Blacksmith. San Francisco · full-time · $180,000–$220,000 base.
Growth Roles summary, based on the employer's posting.
What you'll do
- Set the visual and verbal direction across the website, social channels, events, decks, swag, and other surfaces
- Turn complex technical ideas into visuals that engage engineers and strengthen their confidence
- Extend the visual system across product lines so it remains flexible as new work ships
- Shape launch stories with founders and engineering, then create assets for Hacker News, X, and the blog
- Move quickly through prototypes while protecting craft and quality across the team
What you bring
- At least five years in brand design, ideally for developer tools, infrastructure, or complex B2B products
- A portfolio spanning web, motion, print, and presentations, with strong typography and layout
- Proof that you created or substantially evolved a technical-product brand rather than only following an existing system
- The judgment to explain design choices and bring engineers and founders with you
- Comfort working through ambiguity, exploring multiple options, and using agentic tools to speed up iteration
Who this fits
This suits a polished brand designer who can combine systems thinking with range across media and understands what earns developers' trust. You'll work directly with founders and engineering as the first in-house brand designer. The role is onsite in San Francisco.
From the employer
About Blacksmith
We started by building infrastructure to run CI workloads really fast. Our first product helps companies run GitHub Actions substantially faster and cheaper by owning and operating our own global fleet of bare-metal machines rather than renting generic cloud VMs.
Today, we orchestrate tens of millions of Firecracker VMs each week, running CI for 7,000+ companies and tens of millions in ARR. We’ve grown 10x so far in 2026.
We operate thousands of bare-metal machines across multiple regions, regularly schedule 100k+ vCPUs concurrently, and run a petabyte-scale Ceph cluster that we manage ourselves.
We’ve raised $58.5M from Seed to Series B, led by Google Ventures (GV) & Peak XV Partners, and we’re intentionally building a small, but exceptional team.
Blacksmith was founded by a team with deep systems and scaling experience, including building search/ads infrastructure at Faire, and operating large distributed systems at Cockroach Labs. Our GTM is led by Jon Boyer, formerly Head of Sales at Zapier.
We're now extending the same CI infrastructure into a broader platform: running agent sandboxes at scale and building our own background coding agent on top of it.
Our Brand Designer
We’ve obsessed over brand since day one, and we’ve been laser focused on building a brand that developers love. You can see this on every surface that you interact with Blacksmith; our website, our product interfaces, our content.
We built that foundation with a brand advisor (and investor) who we continue to work with today. Your role will be to own this internally, our first in-house brand designer. You would be inheriting a real system, not a blank page, and taking ownership of where it goes next.
What you'll do
Own how Blacksmith looks and sounds across every surface: website, social, events, decks, swag and more.
Translate genuinely complex technical concepts into visuals that engage and build credibility with engineers.
Build a flexible visual system that holds up across multiple product lines and scales as we ship more, rather than a static brand guideline that goes stale in a quarter.
Work directly with the founders and with engineering on launch narratives, from the shape of the story down to the assets that carry it on Hacker News, X, and the blog.
Ship fast and iterate in public; treat the brand as something that evolves alongside the product.
Raise the bar on craft across the team, ensure we maintain quality whilst we move at speed.
You’re a good fit if you have
You're maniacal about polish and know what earns trust with a developer audience. Instinct and taste are critical here.
5+ years in brand design role, ideally in developer tools, infrastructure, or at the least in a complex B2B product environment.
A portfolio that shows both systems thinking and range across mediums - web, motion, print, and presentation, with strong typography and layout at its core.
Evidence you've built or meaningfully evolved a brand for a technical product, not just executed against someone else's system.
The ability to articulate why a design decision is right and bring engineers and founders along with it.
Comfort with ambiguity.
You love to prototype, you want multiple options for every design choice and you're an expert at leveraging agentic tools to expedite this process.
Compensation and benefits
Medical, Vision, and Dental insurance.
Competitive base + equity.
401k match.
Unlimited PTO.
Annual offsite.
Early-exercise stock options
12 weeks fully paid parental leave (US)
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