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Nominal builds software that lets hardware teams test, iterate, and deploy as fast as software teams.
The Role
Embed with hardware engineering customers to build agentic workflows that perform real engineering tasks, including requirements checks, test-plan analysis, issue investigation, and reusable AI skills. Demonstrate measurable customer value, identify patterns for product development, and represent customer needs internally. The role requires strong Python and data skills, customer-facing communication, modern AI coding-agent experience, and travel to customer sites.
Summary Generated by Built In
About Nominal
About Hardware Intelligence
The Role:
💼 What You'll Do:
🚀 What you'll bring:
⚡️ Nice to have:
Benefits/Perks
Compensation
Engineers today are building some of the most ambitious machines humanity has ever seen. They should have AI that’s purpose-built for them.
Nominal is building the Hardware Intelligence Platform that gives engineers increased visibility into complex physical systems, helps them make better decisions, and ultimately gets their products into the real world faster. It brings together the systems, data, intelligence, and applications hardware engineering requires to meet the AI moment. Hardware engineering teams use Nominal to simulate, test, manufacture, and operate the physical systems that keep the world moving, from spacecraft and autonomous vehicles to next-generation energy systems and robotics.
Our customers span aerospace, defense, manufacturing, transportation, energy, and robotics. They include Anduril, Shield AI, Wisk Aero, Pratt Miller Motorsports, Antares, and Shinkei Systems, amongst others, alongside programs within the U.S. Air Force and Navy. Our team draws from SpaceX, Palantir, Anduril, Applied Intuition, Tesla, and other leading companies, united by a common mission: giving hardware engineers the tools to build the future with speed, safety, and confidence. We're a fast-moving team that owns problems end-to-end, works across disciplines, and thrives at the intersection of hardware and software.
Some of the world’s leading technology investors, including Sequoia, Lightspeed, Founders Fund, General Catalyst, Lux Capital, and Insight Partners, are backing Nominal’s ambition to change how machines are built and operated. We’re looking for engineers who want to take on hard problems and help make a new generation of world-changing hardware possible.
We're the team behind Nominal's agents, AI-native applications, and MCP, and its forward-leaning AI bets. Our mission is to unlock the bottlenecks of the hardware lifecycle with AI. Our agents reason over physical reality, from high-rate telemetry and test campaigns to designs and simulations, where real test results are the ground truth their work is checked against. We believe opinionated AI, built for the real work of hardware programs, will change how the world engineers.
We're collaborative, iterative, and high-agency, and we're human-centered and customer-focused. We build with the newest AI tools every day, and because those tools keep changing, so do we: we stay curious and keep looking for the better way. Our team spans data science and ML, distributed systems, search, and knowledge systems, and we obsess over how agents can be genuinely useful to the engineers who rely on them.
As an AI Forward Deployed Engineer, you'll embed with hardware teams, build agentic workflows and skills on Nominal, and bring back the patterns that should become product.
- Embed with hardware engineering teams at build-partner programs, on site and alongside them.
- Build custom agentic workflows and skills for each partner's programs that do real engineering work: turning requirements and test plans into checks, running analyses, and investigating issues.
- Spot the patterns across customers and bring them back as product: new skills, agent capabilities, and eval tasks.
- Win build partners by proving value: measured before-and-after results on real programs.
- Be the technical voice of the customer inside the Hardware Intelligence team.
- 4+ years as a software engineer, with strong Python and data skills.
- Hands-on experience building agentic workflows: tool use, prompting, skills, and checking whether they actually work.
- Comfort in front of customers: you can run a working session with senior engineers and earn their trust.
- A builder's instinct for what's reusable and what's one-off.
- Willingness to travel to customer sites.
- You build with modern AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex) every day, and stay curious and open to better ways of working. The tools keep changing, and so do we.
- You've been a test, flight test, controls, or hardware engineer before moving into software.
- You've been a forward-deployed or solutions engineer at an AI or data company.
- You've turned a one-off customer build into a reusable product feature.
- You hold an active security clearance, or can obtain one.
- 🏥 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance
- 🏖️ Unlimited PTO and sick leave
- 🍽️ Free lunch, snacks, and coffee
- 🚀 Professional Development Stipend
- 🛠️ In-office hardware lab with a $250 project stipend
- ✈️ Annual company retreat
- 👶 12 weeks parental leave
- 🌱 Fertility and family planning ($15,000 lifetime)
- 💪 Wellness stipend ($100/month)
- 🛠️ $500/year hardware sensor stipend
- 💼 401(k)
- 📈 Employee-friendly equity terms
- 🏢 In-office 5 days per week
All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin.
The base pay range for this role is £148,000 – £184,000 per year.
Skills Required
- 4+ years of experience as a software engineer
- Strong Python and data skills
- Hands-on experience building agentic workflows, including tool use, prompting, skills, and evaluation
- Comfort working directly with customers and leading working sessions with senior engineers
- Ability to identify reusable solutions versus one-off implementations
- Willingness to travel to customer sites
- Experience building with modern AI coding agents such as Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex
- Previous experience as a test, flight test, controls, or hardware engineer
- Previous experience as a forward-deployed or solutions engineer at an AI or data company
- Experience turning a one-off customer build into a reusable product feature
- Active security clearance or ability to obtain one
Nominal Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Nominal and has not been reviewed or approved by Nominal.
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Healthcare Strength — 100% employer-paid medical, dental, and vision coverage is repeatedly described as covering both employees and dependents, indicating unusually strong healthcare provisioning. Additional mentions of “Platinum” coverage reinforce the sense of a high-tier plan offering.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Unlimited PTO and paid holidays/sick time are presented as part of the core package, suggesting broad time-off benefits on paper. Parental leave is also framed as fully paid in several places, reinforcing overall leave breadth.
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Wellbeing & Lifestyle Benefits — Wellness stipends, daily gourmet lunch (and sometimes dinner), and periodic retreats are consistently highlighted as meaningful lifestyle perks. Learning/development and other small stipends further round out a perks-heavy total rewards posture.
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The Company
What We Do
Nominal builds the essential software stack that enables hardware teams to test and iterate as rapidly as software teams. Nominal empowers engineers to continuously monitor, validate, and deploy innovations, transforming how mission-critical hardware is built and operated.
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