Staff Product Engineer, AI - UK Software

Frontdoor Defense; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 110,000 - 180,000; 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 is building the Hardware Intelligence Platform and AI-native applications. We seek a Staff Product Engineer to lead the development of agent products from prototype to production, shaping the UX and guiding a cross-functional team across hardware and software disciplines.

You will prototype, ship end-to-end solutions, and drive a strong user-centric product direction, partnering with design and platform teams to enable engineers to build the future with speed and confidence.

Qualifications

• 8+ years building end-to-end products with a strong front-end and full-stack core.
• Proven track record taking products from zero to one, including AI or agent experiences.
• Deep empathy for users and the habit of learning from them directly.
• Experience with modern AI coding agents and staying curious about better ways of working.

Responsibilities

• Prototype new agent products and interactions quickly to put working ideas in front of engineers.
• Shape the product, build end-to-end, and ship it from concept to production.
• Lead technically across product engineers and partner with design, product, and the agent platform team.
• Maintain a strong focus on user experience and measurable impact.

Skills

Front-end development

Full-stack development

AI/agent experience

Product leadership

User experience focus

Tools

Claude Code

Cursor

Codex

Job description

Staff Product Engineer, AI - UK

Lead development of AI agent products from prototype to production in the UK

Location: London, England

About The Role

Staff Product Engineer

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.

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.

As a Staff Product Engineer, you'll take agent products from zero to one, turning new ideas into prototypes and prototypes into products engineers love, and lead the team that builds them, from the agents engineers use every day to the AI-native apps that come next.

Prototype new agent products and interactions in days, putting working ideas in front of engineers before anything is spec'd.

Take the best ideas from zero to one: shape the product, build it end to end, and ship it.

Obsess over the user experience: watch engineers work, find where agents help and where they get in the way, and fix it.

Set the patterns for agent UX across Nominal: streaming work as it happens, showing every step, citing sources, and letting engineers edit and take over.

Turn hardware workflows (reviews, qualification, reporting) into agent-native products, not chat bolted onto old screens.

Lead technically across product engineers, and partner closely with design, product, and the agent platform team.

8+ years building products end to end, with a strong front-end and full-stack core.

A track record of taking products from zero to one, including AI or agent experiences users chose to use daily.

Product sense and taste: you know what makes a great product great, what to build, what to leave out, and why.

Deep empathy for users, and the habit of learning from them directly.

A track record of setting product engineering 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.

• 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.