About Nominal
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.
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 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.
💼 What you'll do
- 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.
🚀 What you'll bring
- 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.
⚡️ Nice to have
- 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.
Benefits/Perks
- 🏖️ Unlimited PTO and sick leave
- 🍽️ Free lunch, snacks, and coffee
- 🚀 Professional Development Stipend
- ✈️ Annual company retreat
- 🛠️ Hardware sensor stipend
- 📈 Employee-friendly equity terms
- 🏢 In-office 5 days per week
All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin.
Compensation
The base pay range for this role is £148,000 – £220,000 per year.
