Aayush Shah

Aayush Shah is co-founder and co-chief technology officer of Blacksmith, a CI compute company that runs GitHub Actions jobs on faster bare-metal machines. He is based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and leads engineering with co-founder Aditya Maru, while chief executive Aditya Jayaprakash, based in San Francisco, focuses on sales.

Winning the Spartan Award at Cockroach Labs

"I started my career five years ago at a company called Cockroach Labs," Shah said on the Software Huddle podcast in 2025, where he worked on the data placement parts of the CockroachDB distributed SQL database. He co-authored papers at the SIGMOD'22 and VLDB'22 conferences, and his Forbes Councils profile says he won the company's inaugural Spartan Award for helping bring home the biggest deal in its history. He was then a founding engineer at Superblocks, working on its low-code platform.

Chasing Flaky Tests

Cockroach Labs taught him how much slow and unreliable CI costs a large team. "Now the worst kinds of failures are these non-deterministic test failures," he said, describing tests that fail only 1% or 5% of the time and can block everyone else.

He and his co-founders also saw their employers spend heavy effort maintaining CI infrastructure on AWS and other hyperscalers. "So we realized that CI was a class of workloads that you could expatriate out of the hyperscalers," he said.

Leasing Bare Metal From Hetzner

Blacksmith started on bare-metal machines leased from Hetzner in Germany and added capacity in Phoenix, Arizona, with plans to rack its own hardware over time.

Shah has said that customers adopting AI coding tools are running far more CI, with usage growing more than 60% quarter over quarter even after accounting for team size.

Blacksmith's engineers built the company's control plane in Laravel, a PHP framework. "Modern PHP, for all the flak it gets, is surprisingly good and pleasant to work with because it's typed now," he said.