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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, including orchestration, planning, tool calling, memory, background execution, retrieval, context assembly, model routing, and fallbacks. Set technical direction, establish architecture, collaborate on evaluations and platform growth, mentor engineers, and deliver reliable LLM and agent systems to production.
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 Staff 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.
- Design and build the agent harness: orchestration, planning, tool calling, memory, and background agents that run long investigations on their own.
- Own the shared tool layer that our agents and external agents (via MCP) both use, so every capability we build works everywhere.
- Build how agents assemble context: retrieval across test data, documents, designs, and simulations, including sensor data far too large to fit in a context window.
- Make model choice a decision, not a dependency: routing, cost, latency, and fallbacks across frontier models.
- Partner with evals to make quality measurable, and with the platform team on how the context layer grows.
- Set the architecture other engineers build on, and raise the bar through design reviews and mentorship.
- 8+ years building production systems, including real experience shipping LLM or agent systems to users.
- Strong distributed-systems and backend fundamentals; you've owned systems where reliability mattered.
- Opinions about agent architecture (tool design, context management, autonomy, failure handling) and the judgment to change them when data says so.
- A track record of setting technical direction across a team and raising the bar for the engineers around you.
- 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 an agent harness or LLM platform that other engineers or customers build on, at an AI-native company.
- You've shipped long-running, autonomous agents to production and know where they break.
- You've contributed to MCP, agent frameworks, or open-source LLM infrastructure.
- You've built software for physical systems: robots, vehicles, aircraft, or the test stands behind them.
- 🏥 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
- 8+ years building production systems
- Experience shipping LLM or agent systems to users
- Strong distributed-systems and backend fundamentals
- Experience owning reliable production systems
- Knowledge of agent architecture, including tool design, context management, autonomy, and failure handling
- Track record of setting technical direction across a team
- Experience raising engineering quality through technical leadership and mentorship
- Experience using modern AI coding agents such as Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex
- Experience building an agent harness or LLM platform
- Experience shipping long-running autonomous agents to production
- Contributions to MCP, agent frameworks, or open-source LLM infrastructure
- Experience building software for physical systems such as robots, vehicles, aircraft, or test stands
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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