Overview
Schedule
Full-time
Career level
Senior-level
Remote
On-site
Benefits
Health Insurance
Dental Insurance
Vision Insurance
Job Description
About Nominal
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.
About Hardware Intelligence
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.
The Role:
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.
💼 What You'll Do:
- 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.
🚀 What you'll bring:
- 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.
⚡️ Nice to have:
- 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.
Benefits/Perks
- 🏥 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.
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FAQs About Staff Software Engineer, Agents Jobs at Nominal
What is the work location for this position at Nominal?
This job at Nominal is located in New York, New York, according to the details provided by the employer. Some roles may also include multiple work locations depending on the requirement.
What pay range can candidates expect for this role at Nominal?
Employer has not shared pay details for this role.
What employment applies to this position at Nominal?
Nominal lists this role as a Full-time position.
What experience level is required for this role at Nominal?
Nominal is looking for a candidate with "Senior-level" experience level.
What benefits are offered by Nominal for this role?
Nominal offers following benefits: Health Insurance, Dental Insurance, Vision Insurance, Paid Sick Leave, Flexible/Unlimited PTO, Career Development, and Health & Wellness Programs for this position. Actual benefits may vary depending on the employer's policies and employment terms.
What is the process to apply for this position at Nominal?
You can apply for this role at Nominal either through Sonara's automated application system, which helps you submit applications 10X faster with minimal effort, or by applying manually using the direct link on the job page.