Software Engineer, Runtime Infrastructure

Responsibilities

You will build the foundational services, libraries, and APIs that enable other engineering teams to ship reliable and compliant software. Additionally, you will investigate performance bottlenecks and develop tools for observability, profiling, and load testing to ensure system resilience.

Requirements

Candidates must have at least 3 years of experience in backend or full-stack engineering with proficiency in Rust, Java, or TypeScript. A strong understanding of distributed systems, concurrency, and performance engineering is required, along with the ability to design scalable and maintainable infrastructure.

Skills

• Rust
• Java
• TypeScript
• Distributed systems
• Observability
• OpenTelemetry
• Prometheus
• Datadog
• API design
• Performance engineering
• Concurrency
• Networking
• Async runtimes
• Load testing
• System architecture
• Security and compliance

Benefits

• Medical insurance
• Dental insurance
• Vision insurance
• Unlimited PTO
• Sick leave
• Free lunch
• Professional development stipend
• Hardware lab project stipend
• 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.

JOIN NOMINAL AS A SOFTWARE ENGINEER, RUNTIME INFRASTRUCTURE

Nominal runs mission-critical software wherever our customers need it: in our
cloud, in theirs, and on disconnected networks for defense programs. An engineer
might be watching a vehicle in real time or working through terabytes of
post-test data. Either way, every layer between the hardware and the chart on
their screen has to be fast and correct. Our customers expect a lot from us on
reliability, security, and compliance. Runtime Infrastructure builds the
libraries, services, and standards that let every Nominal team meet that bar by
default.

As a Software Engineer on Runtime Infrastructure, you'll build the foundation
the rest of engineering builds on. That covers how our services and applications
are observed, how they record who did what, how they talk to each other, and how
they behave under load and failure. Your main users are other Nominal engineers.
If you do this well, they ship faster, catch problems sooner, and meet our
customers' standards without having to think about it. Through them, your work
reaches the aerospace, defense, and autonomy teams who use Nominal for
mission-critical testing.

We're hiring both backend and full stack engineers for this team. You'll build
services, libraries, and APIs that have to be correct, fast, and long-lived.
You'll care about architecture across the whole stack: how our web applications
are structured, how they talk to the backend, and how they behave in production.
You'll have a lot of autonomy and work closely with product, frontend, platform,
and deployment engineers. You'll help shape the requirements yourself, with
input from fellow engineers and our customers, and make the tradeoffs that
decide how our systems are built. You'll also be able to contribute to the open
source projects we depend on.

🚀 ABOUT THE ROLE

Build the foundation other engineers stand on
Build the service frameworks and shared libraries that every Nominal service
starts from: configuration, health checks, graceful shutdown, resource limits,
resilience, secure defaults, and the conventions for how services define their
APIs and talk to each other. The goal is that a new service is reliable,
observable, and compliant from its first commit. You'll measure success by how
quickly other engineers can ship, debug, and operate their own services.

Find where the time and memory go
Investigate concurrency, memory, and latency problems across our services.
You'll build runtime metrics, profiling, and load testing, then turn what you
find into fixes, and into tools other engineers can use on their own.

Success in this role comes from treating other engineers as your customers.
You'll spend as much time understanding how teams build, run, and debug software
as you will writing code.

🙌 WE'D LOVE TO HEAR FROM YOU IF YOU HAVE

* 3+ years of experience as a backend or full stack engineer, building and
running production systems where performance, reliability, and operational
simplicity matter.
* Strong experience in at least one of Rust, Java, or TypeScript, with an
emphasis on correctness, clarity, and long-lived systems. You don't need all
three, but you should be excited to work across them.
* Experience designing libraries, frameworks, or APIs that other engineers
build on: hiding complexity behind simple interfaces, sensible defaults, and
changing things without breaking the people who depend on you.
* Hands-on experience with observability tools such as OpenTelemetry,
Prometheus, or Datadog, including metrics, traces, and alerts that engineers
actually rely on.
* A solid understanding of concurrency, async runtimes, networking, and how
distributed systems behave under load and failure.
* A systems mindset. You like working out how a system should behave, and how
it will fail, before you build it.
* Excellent communication skills, and the ability to explain technical
tradeoffs clearly to the engineers who depend on your work.
* A bias toward ownership: you design it, build it, ship it, and run it.

⚡ SKILLS THAT SUPERCHARGE US

Security & Compliance
Experience building audit logging, access controls, data-handling safeguards, or
other systems that help a company meet ...

About Nominal

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