Nominal builds software that lets hardware teams test, iterate, and deploy as fast as software teams.
The Role
Build and own Nominal’s shared frontend compute and data layer for high-throughput live and historical hardware data. Develop streaming, caching, WebSocket, web worker, and columnar-data capabilities; optimize browser memory, rendering, and runtime performance; and ensure data correctness. Partner with product, design, and backend teams to shape workflows, expose compute features, and simplify complex technical experiences for users monitoring mission-critical systems.
Summary Generated by Built In
About Nominal
Join Nominal as a Full Stack Software Engineer, Compute
🚀 About the role
🙌 We'd love to hear from you if you have
⚡ Skills that supercharge us
✨ Benefits/Perks
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.
At Nominal, the frontend goes far beyond a visual layer on top of APIs. It's where thousands of high-frequency data sources are streamed and drawn on screen in time for an engineer to decide whether to continue, pause, or abort tests running against real hardware. Our customers monitor mission-critical systems through Nominal, so the data has to be fast, correct, and trustworthy at every layer. Meeting that bar means balancing raw performance with an experience engineers can depend on and understand, so they can build trust in the platform.
We're looking for product engineers who care about high-scale data computation, runtime performance, and device constraints as much as building intuitive interfaces. You'll work at the intersection of product, design, and engineering to turn a highly expressive compute engine into the foundation that every visualization in Nominal depends on, from highly optimized time series charts to flexible user-defined custom visualizations. Success in this role is measured by building a data layer that stays fast, correct, and observable on whatever device and network our customers bring.
You'll partner closely with backend engineers, designers, and product teams to define workflows, shape product direction, and make thoughtful technical tradeoffs in an environment where requirements are often ambiguous and the best solutions aren't immediately obvious. You'll own the shared compute and data layer of the platform’s applications end to end. Your judgment will shape how live and historical data workflows feel across the whole product.
🚀 About the role
Build the data foundation every application stands on
Own the layer between Nominal's compute engine and the user: streaming over WebSockets, orchestrating web workers, handling columnar data formats, caching intelligently, and processing live and historical data on the client. You'll design generalized data and compute capabilities that serve today's product and the use cases we haven't met yet, so that new panels, new query types, and open-ended user-defined visualizations can be built quickly on the stability and guarantees already in place.
Make performance and correctness non-negotiable
Customers stream thousands of high-frequency series into live monitoring dashboards with low-latency expectations and zero tolerance for incorrect data. You'll squeeze everything possible out of varied user hardware, hunt memory leaks down to the allocation, benchmark and profile the render pipeline, and handle out-of-order, late, and missing data so the picture on screen converges on the truth.
Own ambiguous product problems
Partner closely with product, design, and engineering to turn loosely defined ideas into intuitive user experiences. You'll challenge assumptions, validate workflows directly with users, and make confident product decisions when requirements are incomplete.
Bring new compute capabilities to users
Take new features from the compute layer and expose them in a composable, scalable form that end users can understand: new capabilities, aggregations, grouping mechanisms, and transforms that can power every application and workflow in the Nominal platform.
Make complexity feel simple
Design experiences that expose powerful capabilities without overwhelming users. You'll think deeply about information architecture, interaction design, and how technical users reason about their work.
Success in this role comes from combining strong frontend engineering with product judgment. You'll spend as much time thinking about how users reason about complex systems as you will writing React code.
- 3+ years experience building products for technical users where you’ve been involved in the infrastructure behind demanding, data-heavy applications.
- Strong experience with TypeScript, and modern frontend architecture, along with an understanding of how frontend systems interact with backend services.
- Experience building high-throughput data applications in the browser, with hands-on use of web workers, WebSockets, columnar formats such as Apache Arrow, and canvas or WebGL/WebGPU rendering.
- A deep understanding of the web as a runtime: memory allocation and garbage collection, message passing between threads, the performance characteristics of network transports, and how a rendering pipeline actually spends its frame budget.
- Strong product instincts. You naturally ask "Why are we building this?" before "How should I implement it?" and aren't afraid to challenge assumptions when you believe there's a better solution for users.
- A systems mindset. You enjoy reasoning about data models, user workflows, and how complex systems should behave before jumping into implementation.
- Excellent communication skills and the ability to explain technical and product tradeoffs clearly across engineering, design, and product teams.
⚡ Skills that supercharge us
Browser Familiarity
A deep understanding of the browser as an environment for data-intensive applications: threading, networking, memory, and the rendering pipeline.
Streaming Real-time Data
Experience building interfaces over live data streams, and balancing the speed, correctness, and resilience they demand.
Performance Engineering
Experience with client-side memory management, benchmarking, profiling, and an obsession with delivering a fluid user experience.
Systems Thinking
Experience designing products around complex object models, relationships, and workflows rather than simple CRUD interfaces.
Product Thinking
Ability to understand user goals, simplify complicated workflows, and make thoughtful product decisions under ambiguity.
Frontend Architecture
Strong experience with React, TypeScript, modern state management, asynchronous data flows, and scalable application architecture.
Backend Collaboration
Comfort reasoning about APIs, data loading strategies, backend constraints, and making architectural tradeoffs across the full stack.
Performance Engineering
Experience optimizing rendering, managing large datasets, virtualized interfaces, streaming updates, caching strategies, and browser performance.
- 🏥 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.
ITAR Requirements
To conform to U.S. Government export regulations, applicant must be a (i) U.S. citizen or national, (ii) U.S. lawful, permanent resident (aka green card holder), (iii) Refugee under 8 U.S.C. § 1157, or (iv) Asylee under 8 U.S.C. § 1158, or be eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State. Learn more about the ITAR here.
CompensationThe base pay range for this role is $179,000 – $310,000 per year.
Skills Required
- 3+ years of experience building products for technical users involving demanding, data-heavy applications
- Strong experience with TypeScript and modern frontend architecture
- Understanding of how frontend systems interact with backend services
- Experience building high-throughput data applications in the browser
- Hands-on experience with web workers, WebSockets, columnar formats such as Apache Arrow, and canvas or WebGL/WebGPU rendering
- Deep understanding of browser runtime behavior, including memory allocation, garbage collection, message passing, network transports, and rendering pipelines
- Strong product instincts and ability to make product decisions under ambiguity
- Systems mindset for data models, user workflows, and complex system behavior
- Excellent communication skills and ability to explain technical and product tradeoffs
- Experience with React, modern state management, asynchronous data flows, and scalable application architecture
- Experience optimizing rendering, managing large datasets, virtualized interfaces, streaming updates, caching strategies, and browser performance
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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