Job Description

About Nominal

Nominal is a venture-backed company with offices in Los Angeles, Austin, and New York City. We build software and data solutions for organizations, testing and validating complex systems—think drones, robots, rocket engines, and satellites. Backed by top investors like General Catalyst, Founders Fund, and Lux Capital, we’re gaining momentum across the commercial and government aerospace and defense ecosystem, including direct work with the Department of Defense.

Our team includes alumni from SpaceX, Meta, Palantir, Anduril, Lockheed Martin, and NASA, united by a mission: accelerate hardware innovation by making testing faster, smarter, and easier. Our platform helps engineering teams scale their test infrastructure and gain insight from high-throughput, high-complexity test data.

We're looking for a senior engineer to take on a high-leverage role focused on strengthening the foundations of our distributed systems and improving how the entire team builds, ships, and maintains software. This role is ideal for someone who thrives in complex environments, has deep experience with incident response and production systems, and is driven to create safer, faster systems through smart infrastructure and process design.

• 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, leading postmortems and embedding learnings into tools, practices, and culture across the company.
• Collaborate with teams to improve release hygiene , including: Automating release gating (e.g., ensuring code bakes in staging for appropriate windows), 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 7+ 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, PostgreSQL or other SQL databases, MongoDB/NoSQL 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

$150,000 - $180,000 a year

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

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