Backend Architect - Distributed Systems (Go/Rust/Java)

Nominal; Greater London; On-site; GBP 125,000 - 185,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

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

Job summary

Nominal in London is hiring a Backend Software Engineer to help build the Hardware Intelligence Platform. You’ll own end-to-end backend systems, from ingestion pipelines to scalable storage, across cloud, on-prem, and air-gapped environments.

The role targets engineers who love systems close to the metal, with strong skills in Go/Rust/Java, cloud platforms, and distributed data processing. In-office 5 days a week with a fast-moving, ownership-focused culture.

Qualifications

• 3+ years building distributed systems where performance, reliability, and operational simplicity matter.
• Strong experience in Go, Rust, or Java, with an emphasis on correctness, clarity, and long-lived systems.
• Deep familiarity with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and production tooling like Kubernetes, Docker, and Terraform.
• Hands‑on experience designing or operating storage systems: time-series databases, columnar formats, or analytics engines (e.g., ClickHouse, TimescaleDB, Druid, InfluxDB, Parquet).
• Experience with streaming or data processing technologies such as Kafka, Apache Arrow, Flink, or Spark.
• Comfort reasoning about distributed systems tradeoffs: latency vs. throughput, consistency vs. availability, abstraction vs. control.
• Clear technical communication and a bias toward ownership: you design it, build it, ship it, and operate it.

Responsibilities

• Architect and evolve distributed systems that ingest, process, and persist high-frequency telemetry and sensor data.
• Design storage and indexing strategies for large, time-series, and event-driven datasets with strict performance and correctness requirements.
• Tackle hard problems around scalability, backpressure, fault tolerance, and data consistency in real-time systems.
• Optimize hot paths, reduce tail latency, and improve reliability as the system scales with new customers and use cases.
• Collaborate closely with product, infrastructure, and customer-facing engineers to solve domain-specific problems for cutting-edge hardware teams.
• Influence backend architecture and technical direction, mentor teammates, and raise the bar for system design across the org.

Skills

Go

Rust

Java

Distributed systems

Cloud infrastructure

Kubernetes

Docker

Terraform

Time-series DBs

Kafka / streaming

Tools

ClickHouse

TimescaleDB

Druid

InfluxDB

Parquet

Job description

Nominal in London is hiring a Backend Software Engineer to help build the Hardware Intelligence Platform. You’ll own end-to-end backend systems, from ingestion pipelines to scalable storage, across cloud, on-prem, and air-gapped environments.

The role targets engineers who love systems close to the metal, with strong skills in Go/Rust/Java, cloud platforms, and distributed data processing. In-office 5 days a week with a fast-moving, ownership-focused culture.