Software Engineer, Runtime Infrastructure

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.

Nominal runs mission-critical software wherever our customers need it: in our cloud, in theirs, and on disconnected networks for defense programs. An engineer might be watching a vehicle in real time or working through terabytes of post-test data. Either way, every layer between the hardware and the chart on their screen has to be fast and correct. Our customers expect a lot from us on reliability, security, and compliance. Runtime Infrastructure builds the libraries, services, and standards that let every Nominal team meet that bar by default.

As a Software Engineer on Runtime Infrastructure, you'll build the foundation the rest of engineering builds on. That covers how our services and applications are observed, how they record who did what, how they talk to each other, and how they behave under load and failure. Your main users are other Nominal engineers. If you do this well, they ship faster, catch problems sooner, and meet our customers' standards without having to think about it. Through them, your work reaches the aerospace, defense, and autonomy teams who use Nominal for mission-critical testing.

We're hiring both backend and full stack engineers for this team. You'll build services, libraries, and APIs that have to be correct, fast, and long-lived. You'll care about architecture across the whole stack: how our web applications are structured, how they talk to the backend, and how they behave in production. You'll have a lot of autonomy and work closely with product, frontend, platform, and deployment engineers. You'll help shape the requirements yourself, with input from fellow engineers and our customers, and make the tradeoffs that decide how our systems are built. You'll also be able to contribute to the open source projects we depend on.

Build the service frameworks and shared libraries that every Nominal service starts from: configuration, health checks, graceful shutdown, resource limits, resilience, secure defaults, and the conventions for how services define their APIs and talk to each other. The goal is that a new service is reliable, observable, and compliant from its first commit. You'll measure success by how quickly other engineers can ship, debug, and operate their own services.

Investigate concurrency, memory, and latency problems across our services. You'll build runtime metrics, profiling, and load testing, then turn what you find into fixes, and into tools other engineers can use on their own.

Experience building audit logging, access controls, data-handling safeguards, or other systems that help a company meet security and compliance requirements.

Experience with schema-driven APIs and RPC frameworks, code generation, and keeping APIs compatible as many teams build on them.

Experience instrumenting services and following a request across process, network, and browser boundaries.

Experience profiling CPU and memory, load testing, and turning measurements into concrete improvements.

Experience with backpressure, bulkheads, rate limiting, retries, and graceful degradation in production systems.

A track record of building tools, libraries, or platforms that made other engineers more productive.

Experience with Tokio or similar, and a feel for what the runtime is doing under the hood.

Experience designing how large TypeScript/React applications are structured: data fetching, caching, state management, and the API boundaries they depend on.