Production Engineer

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 are 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 Space

X, 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.

• 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, lead postmortems, and embed learnings into tools, practices, and culture across the company.
• Collaborate with teams to improve release hygiene, including automating release gating, 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.

• 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.

• Experience working on distributed systems at scale.
• Hands‑on experience with Kafka/Redpanda, Postgre
  
  SQL or other SQL databases, Mongo
  
  DB/No
  
  SQL 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.

• 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Unlimited PTO and sick leave
• Free lunch, snacks, and coffee
• Professional Development Stipend
• Annual company retreats

The base pay range for this role is $150,000 – $265,000 per year.

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin.

To conform to U.S. Government export regulations, an applicant must be a (i) U.S. citizen or national, (ii) U.S. lawful permanent resident (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.

• 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.