Staff Software Engineer, Agents - UK

Responsibilities

You will design and build the agent harness, including orchestration, planning, and memory systems for hardware intelligence. Additionally, you will set the technical architecture for the team and ensure the scalability and reliability of the agent platform.

Requirements

Candidates must have 8+ years of experience building production systems with a focus on LLM or agent-based architectures. Strong fundamentals in distributed systems and a track record of technical leadership are essential for this role.

Skills

• LLM
• Agent systems
• Distributed systems
• Backend development
• Orchestration
• Tool calling
• Memory management
• Retrieval systems
• Data science
• Machine learning
• Architecture design
• Mentorship
• System reliability
• AI frameworks
• Hardware engineering

Benefits

• Unlimited PTO
• Sick leave
• Free lunch
• Snacks
• Coffee
• Professional development stipend
• Annual company retreat
• Hardware sensor stipend
• Employee-friendly equity terms

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 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

* 🏖️ 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.

About Nominal

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