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Nominal builds software that lets hardware teams test, iterate, and deploy as fast as software teams.
The Role
Design and build the platform powering Nominal’s AI agents, MCP, and internal agent applications. Develop agent tools, workflows, integrations, and customer-facing capabilities for hardware engineering use cases. Instrument systems, evaluate performance, debug production issues, and collaborate directly with customer engineering teams. The role requires owning capabilities end to end, shipping iteratively, and applying hands-on experience with LLM features, prompting, retrieval, and tool design.
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 a Software Engineer supporting agents, you'll design how Nominal's agents work: you'll architect the one platform our agents, the Nominal MCP, and our internal agent all run on, and set technical direction for the team that builds on it.
- Build agent tools and workflows that ship to every customer, from turning test plans into automated checks to running investigations across tests.
- Grow the Nominal MCP so external agents can do more of the work our users do, safely and with the user's own permissions.
- Build the integrations our internal company agent needs to work across Nominal's own tools and teams.
- Turn the patterns forward-deployed engineers find in the field into capabilities every customer gets.
- Instrument what you ship, read the traces, and fix what the evals and users tell you.
- Work directly with engineers at customer programs to understand how the work is really done.
- 4+ years as a strong backend or full-stack engineer.
- Hands-on experience shipping LLM features to real users: prompting, tool design, retrieval, and the debugging that comes after.
- Speed with good judgment: you ship small, measure, and iterate.
- Comfort with ambiguity and with owning a capability from idea to production.
- 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 built MCP servers or agent tools that other agents rely on in production.
- You've shipped an agent feature that measurably changed how people work, and you can show the numbers.
- You've built or contributed to open-source agent tooling.
- You've been an engineer in hardware, test, controls, or robotics, or worked closely with those teams.
- 🏖️ Unlimited PTO and sick leave
- 🍽️ Free lunch, snacks, and coffee
- 🚀 Professional Development Stipend
- ✈️ Annual company retreat
- 🛠️ Hardware sensor stipend
- 📈 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 – £220,000 per year.
Skills Required
- 4+ years of experience as a strong backend or full-stack software engineer
- Hands-on experience shipping LLM features to real users
- Experience with prompting, tool design, retrieval, and post-launch debugging
- Ability to ship iteratively, measure results, and make sound technical judgments
- Comfort working with ambiguity and owning capabilities from concept through production
- Experience building with modern AI coding agents such as Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex
- Experience building MCP servers or production agent tools
- Experience shipping an agent feature with measurable impact
- Open-source agent tooling contribution or development experience
- Experience in hardware, testing, controls, or robotics, or close collaboration with those teams
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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