Lead Software Engineer, Backend - Growth & Monetization

Responsibilities

You will lead the backend development for the Growth & Monetization team, owning the technical strategy for metering, billing, and customer lifecycle infrastructure. You will be hands-on in designing and building core systems while collaborating with product and business leadership to drive platform adoption.

Requirements

The role requires 5+ years of professional backend engineering experience with proficiency in Go, Rust, or Java. Candidates must have a strong background in distributed systems and a proven track record of technical leadership in domains like billing or entitlements.

Skills

• Backend engineering
• Go
• Rust
• Java
• Distributed systems
• Data modeling
• Billing infrastructure
• Metering
• Entitlements
• Product-led growth
• AI-powered applications
• Technical leadership
• System architecture
• API design
• Software development

Benefits

• Medical insurance
• Dental insurance
• Vision insurance
• Unlimited PTO
• Sick leave
• Free lunch
• Professional development stipend
• Hardware lab
• Annual company retreat
• Parental leave
• Fertility and family planning
• Wellness stipend
• Hardware sensor stipend
• 401(k)
• Equity

About this role

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 THE ROLE

We're looking for a product-minded engineer to set the technical direction for
how customers discover, adopt and realize value from Nominal.

You'll lead the backend side of our new Growth & Monetization team, working at
the intersection of product engineering, infrastructure and business strategy.
Our scope spans the entire customer journey, from self-serve signup and
onboarding to pricing and billing infrastructure, intelligent notifications,
product discovery and customer value realization. We're also exploring how AI
can transform these experiences, whether that's personalizing onboarding,
proactively guiding customers toward deeper platform adoption, helping customers
understand the value they're getting from Nominal or automating business value
assessments to support renewals and expansion.

You'll own the systems underneath the customer journey: metering, billing,
entitlements, provisioning and the infrastructure that makes self-serve
expansion possible.

This is a role for someone who decides what's worth building, not just how to
build it. You'll identify growth constraints, set the goals the team executes
toward and be the technical authority for this domain across Nominal. You'll be
hands-on from day one, designing, building and operating the core systems
yourself, and your work will directly shape how customers adopt the platform,
understand the value they're getting and expand their relationship with Nominal.
You'll own the business outcomes as well as the technical decisions. As the team
grows around you, there's a path to leading it, but the first job is building
the foundation. You'll work closely with product, design and go-to-market
leadership and have direct exposure to the business leaders whose outcomes
depend on this work.

🚀 WHAT YOU'LL DO

* Set the technical strategy for monetization infrastructure. Own the roadmap
for metering, billing, entitlements, pricing and packaging, and decide what
gets built, in what order and why.
* Identify and unlock growth opportunities. Find the technical and product
constraints across acquisition, activation, retention and monetization,
decide which are worth solving and measure the business impact of solving
them.
* Build the core systems yourself. Design, ship and operate the first versions
of the infrastructure this team depends on, and set the patterns the
engineers who follow will build on.
* Make customer value tangible. Build the systems that measure product
adoption, quantify business outcomes and power automated business value
assessments and customer-facing insights.
* Build frictionless customer journeys. Own the systems behind self-serve
signup, onboarding, account provisioning, payments and activation.
* Drive product discovery and engagement. Build the notification and messaging
infrastructure for feature announcements, contextual guidance and
personalized nudges toward deeper adoption.
* Build AI-native growth experiences. Develop the agents and intelligent
systems that personalize onboarding, surface adoption opportunities and
automate customer-facing workflows.
* Set the engineering bar for a new function. Establish the standards, review
practices and operating norms the team works to, and help shape who joins it
as it grows.

🔍 WE'RE LOOKING FOR SOMEONE WITH

* 5+ years of professional software engineering experience building and
operating production backend systems, including setting the technical
direction for a domain like billing, metering or entitlements, not just a
project within it.
* Strong experience in Go, Rust or Java, with an emphasis on correctness,
clarity and long-lived systems.
* You've tech-led a team or formally mentored engineers, set the standard
others worked to and been accountable for what the group delivered.
* You've been the person other teams come to for decisions in your domain, and
you've owned the tradeoffs across engineering, product and finance.
* Deep understanding of distributed systems and data modeling for systems that
have to be correct, like billing and entitlements.
* You identify opportunities from data, run experiments and measure impact on
customer adoption and busi...

About Nominal

Software Development · 201-500 employees · headquartered in Austin, TX · founded 2022