Staff Software Engineer, Agents - UK

Nominal; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Unlimited PTO

Free lunch

Dev stipend

Annual retreat

Hardware stipend

Equity

In-office 5 days a week

Job summary

Nominal in London is seeking a Staff Engineer to design Nominal's agent platform and MCP. You will shape the technical direction for the team building AI-native hardware software.

You’ll work across data, models, and systems to enable reliable, scalable agents, mentor engineers, and drive architecture decisions that impact product delivery and future capability.

Qualifications

• 8+ years building production systems with 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.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Skills

Production systems

Distributed systems

LLM/agent experience

Technical leadership

AI tools knowledge

Tools

Claude Code

Cursor

Codex

Job description

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.