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, workflows, integrations, and customer-facing tools. Develop LLM features involving prompting, tool design, retrieval, observability, and evaluation. Collaborate directly with hardware engineers and customer programs, convert field insights into scalable capabilities, and own agent functionality from concept through production. The role also involves shaping technical direction and improving how agents support hardware testing and operations.
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
Our mission is to accelerate how the world engineers new hardware. Nominal's connected test and operations platform powers the world's most advanced hardware programs and its most ambitious startups, from spacecraft, racecars, and autonomous vehicles to next-generation defense and energy programs. Our customers include Anduril, Shield AI, Hermeus, Albedo, Shinkei, and Pratt Miller Motorsports, as well as U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force programs. Now we're expanding across the entire hardware lifecycle, building the foundation, AI-native applications, and agents that accelerate innovators' work and change what's possible to build.
We're backed by Sequoia, General Catalyst, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, and Lightspeed, and our team comes from SpaceX, Apple, Palantir, Anduril, Applied Intuition, and other leading companies.
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.
- 🏥 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance
- 🏖️ Unlimited PTO and sick leave
- 🍽️ Free lunch, snacks, and coffee
- 🚀 Professional Development Stipend
- ✈️ Annual company retreat
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.
Skills Required
- 4+ years of experience as a strong backend or full-stack engineer
- Hands-on experience shipping LLM features to real users
- Experience with prompting, tool design, retrieval, and debugging LLM features
- Ability to ship incrementally, measure results, and iterate with good judgment
- Comfort working with ambiguity and owning capabilities from idea 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 measurable agent features
- Open-source agent tooling 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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