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Nominal builds software that lets hardware teams test, iterate, and deploy as fast as software teams.
The Role
The Production Engineer will improve distributed systems reliability, automate processes, lead incident reviews, and enhance tooling across engineering teams with a focus on safety and efficiency.
Summary Generated by Built In
About Nominal
Nominal is building the connected test and operations platform powering the world's most advanced hardware systems, from spacecraft and autonomous vehicles to next-generation defense programs. Our platform gives hardware engineering teams a single place to ingest data, analyze performance, automate test execution, and collaborate across every phase of development, so they can move faster without sacrificing safety or precision. We're a fast-moving team that owns problems end-to-end, works across disciplines, and thrives at the intersection of hardware and software.
We serve top-tier commercial and defense customers, from autonomy leaders like Anduril and Shield AI to next-generation aerospace teams like Hermeus and REGENT, and performance engineering teams like Pratt Miller Motorsports, alongside mission partners within the U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force on programs where failure isn’t an option. We’re backed by Sequoia, General Catalyst, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, and Lightspeed. Our team draws from SpaceX, Palantir, Anduril, Applied Intuition, 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 looking for a Production Engineer to take on a high-leverage role focused on strengthening the foundations of our distributed systems and improving how the entire team builds, ships, and maintains software. This role is ideal for someone who thrives in complex environments, has deep experience with incident response and production systems, and is driven to create safer, faster systems through smart infrastructure and process design.
🚀 What You’ll Do
- Drive reliability and observability improvements across large-scale distributed systems.
- Serve as a force multiplier across all engineering teams by reducing downtime, improving tooling, and freeing up senior engineers from firefighting.
- Own and evolve our incident review process, leading postmortems, and embedding learnings into tools, practices, and culture across the company.
- Collaborate with teams to improve release hygiene, including: Automating release gating (e.g., ensuring code bakes in staging for appropriate windows), preventing code from stagnating in staging environments, and implementing pre-prod automated test pipelines to catch issues early.
- Build and maintain Nominal’s gRPC middleware to ensure safe, observable, and performant service communication.
- Improve alerting, debugging, and monitoring to ensure production health and rapid root cause analysis.
🔍 Who You Are
- You have 5+ years of experience in software engineering with a strong focus on production systems and distributed architectures.
- You thrive in high-leverage roles that improve how everyone else builds, ships, and fixes software.
- You’ve led or played a significant role in incident response, building systems, and culture around continuous improvement.
- You’re excited by complexity, not afraid of it, and you’re deeply motivated to make systems safer and teams faster.
⚡Skills that supercharge us
- Experience working on distributed systems at scale.
- Hands-on experience with Kafka/Redpanda, PostgreSQL or other SQL databases, MongoDB/NoSQL databases, Clickhouse or other OLAP databases.
- Deep understanding of release automation, CI/CD, and code lifecycle management.
- Familiarity with gRPC and experience building shared infrastructure components like middleware.
- A systems mindset—you understand the ripple effects of a single bug and know how to design to prevent them
✨ Benefits & Perks
- 🏥 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance
- 🏖️ Unlimited PTO and sick leave
- 🍽️ Free lunch, snacks, and coffee
- 🚀 Professional Development Stipend
- ✈️ Annual company retreats
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 $150,000 – $265,000 per year.
Skills Required
- 7+ years of experience in software engineering
- Experience working on distributed systems at scale
- Hands-on experience with Kafka, PostgreSQL, MongoDB or NoSQL databases
- Deep understanding of release automation, CI/CD
- Familiarity with gRPC and middleware components
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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