Staff Software Engineer, Agents - UK Software

Frontdoor Defense; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 140,000 - 190,000; 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 seeking a Staff Engineer to lead the design and build of the agent harness and MCP platform for its UK team in London. You will shape how Nominal's agents operate, architect the single platform used by internal and external agents, and set technical direction for a cross-disciplinary team.

You will own core agent capabilities, improve context management, and drive reliability and performance of AI-driven hardware intelligence tooling in production environments.

Qualifications

• 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).
• A track record of setting technical direction across a team and raising the bar for engineers.

Responsibilities

• Design and build the agent harness: orchestration, planning, tool calling, memory, and background agents.
• Own the shared tool layer that our agents and external agents (via MCP) both use.
• Build how agents assemble context: retrieval across data sources and large sensor data sets.
• Make model choice a decision, not a dependency: routing, cost, latency, and fallbacks across frontier models.
• Partner with evals to measure quality and with platform teams to grow the context layer.
• Set the architecture others build on, and mentor engineers.

Skills

Distributed systems

Backend engineering

LLM/agent systems

Technical leadership

Agent architecture

Tools

Claude Code

Cursor

Codex

Job description

Staff Software Engineer, Agents - UK

Lead design and build of the agent harness and MCP platform for Nominal's UK team

Location: London, England

About The Role

Staff Engineer Role At 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 required 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.

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.