---
title: 'Staff Software Engineer, Agents at Nominal'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/staff-software-engineer-agents-nominal-new-york-p8z0h4jat4ct'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-14'
---

# Staff Software Engineer, Agents at Nominal

- **Company:** Nominal
- **Location:** New York, NY
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-10-05
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-14
- **Apply:** https://jobs.gem.com/nominal/am9icG9zdDpbhtDI2EeP7tnEhxkCLJKz

## 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](https://www.pmddtc.state.gov/?id=ddtc_kb_article_page&sys_id=24d528fddbfc930044f9ff621f961987).

## About Nominal

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Nominal provides a unified industrial data stack that enables hardware engineering teams to test, analyze, and operate mission-critical systems with the speed of software development.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series B, 2026)
- **Headquarters**: Los Angeles, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2022
- **Founders**: Cameron McCord (Co-founder & CEO)

## Core Business
- Primary industry: Aerospace & Defense, Hardware Testing, Industrial Data Infrastructure
- Target customers: B2B – Engineering teams at startups, enterprises, and government agencies building complex hardware (e.g., autonomous vehicles, space systems, hypersonics)
- Mission: "Equip engineers to test and operate critical technology" – delivering the tools and infrastructure to deliver mission-critical capabilities at scale in the shortest time possible.

## Products & Services
- **[Nominal Core](https://nominal.io)**: A cloud-based collaborative workspace that ingests, structures, and analyzes telemetry, logs, video, and simulation results. Provides real-time mission control, trend analysis, and automated reporting to accelerate development, production, and operations. (SaaS)
- **[Nominal Connect](https://nominal.io)**: An edge compute platform for hardware test. Deploys Python-based test apps on-premises, turns scripts into operator-ready interfaces, and runs tests deterministically at the edge (lab, remote range, air-gapped). Automatically syncs results to Core for deeper analysis. (On-premise/Edge software)

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total funding of **$182.5M** across 5 rounds (Seed, Series A, Series B, and a non-equity assistance)
- **Notable Investors**: Founders Fund (led Series B), General Catalyst (led Series A), Lux Capital (led Seed), and Sequoia Capital (partnered 2025)
- **Growth Signals**:
  - Headcount grew **+202.5% YoY** to 196 employees (as of 2026)
  - 17,984 LinkedIn followers (+209.7% yearly)
  - Customer Anduril reduced test review time from 5+ hours to near real-time across 300+ engineers
  - Active job postings: 67 (up +346.7% yearly)
  - Offices in Los Angeles (HQ), New York, Austin, Pflugerville (TX)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Unified platform** that replaces fragmented test tools – one data model for telemetry, logs, video, simulations, and documents
- **Built by engineers from Palantir, SpaceX, Anduril, and Lockheed Martin** – deep domain expertise in mission-critical hardware
- **Edge-to-cloud architecture** that works in air-gapped, offline, and secure environments
- **Enterprise-grade security and scale** with support for startups, large enterprises, and government deployments
- **Open API, SDKs, and integration ecosystem** allowing teams to modernize legacy systems without disruption

## Strategic Focus
- Continue scaling the platform to serve larger defense and aerospace programs (e.g., integrated programs, fleet management)
- Expand into manufacturing test lines and production environments (scaling test code from prototype to manufacturing)
- Deepen government partnerships and secure FedRAMP or similar certifications
- Grow headcount aggressively, especially in engineering, mission operations, and sales roles

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: "Engineers building for Engineers" – a tight-knit team of operators and builders from Palantir, SpaceX, Anduril, and more. High ownership, real impact on hardware that flies, launches, or defends.
- **Work Policy**: In-office **5 days per week** (LA, NY, Austin, Pflugerville). Gourmet lunch provided daily.
- **Perks & Benefits**:
  - 100% covered health, dental, and vision insurance (for you and family)
  - Unlimited paid vacation
  - 12-weeks parental leave
  - Fertility and family planning ($15,000 lifetime)
  - $500/year hardware sensor stipend
  - Wellness stipend ($100/month)
  - 401K with employer match
  - Learning & development stipend
  - Employee-friendly equity terms
- **Growth Trajectory**: Over 200% yearly headcount growth, recent Series B funding, and a clear mission to accelerate the "hardware renaissance" – strong signal for career growth and impact.

## Sources
1. [Nominal Careers Page](https://nominal.io/careers)
2. [Nominal About Us](https://nominal.io/about-us)
3. [Nominal Product Page](https://nominal.io/?j=35813&sfmc_sub=16110646&l=1582_HTML&u=1011363&mid=546014653&jb=234&sfmc_id=16110646)
4. [LinkedIn Company Profile](https://linkedin.com/company/nominal-inc)
5. [Sequoia Capital Portfolio](https://sequoiacap.com/companies/nominal/)

## Other roles at Nominal

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- [Mission Operations Engineer - Internship (Summer 2027)](https://feeny.ai/job/mission-operations-engineer-internship-summer-2027-nominal-new-york-5gsypakwa054) — New York, NY
- [Business Development Lead - OSW and Defense Agencies](https://feeny.ai/job/business-development-lead-osw-and-defense-agencies-nominal-new-york-nstt5whj3knx) — New York, NY
- [Forward Deployed Engineer, AI](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-ai-nominal-new-york-jm7k2gzpjtzs) — New York, NY
- [Staff Research Engineer, Agent Evals & Post-training](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-research-engineer-agent-evals-post-training-nominal-new-york-7tqg9r66hxme) — New York, NY
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