Baremetal Infrastructure Engineer

Nominal; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance

Unlimited PTO and sick leave

Free lunch, snacks, and coffee

Professional Development Stipend

In-office hardware lab with a $250 project stipend

Annual company retreat

Job summary

Nominal in Seattle is looking for an expert in deploying and supporting customer-hosted environments. The role involves troubleshooting Linux and infrastructure issues, building deployment tooling, and working closely with customer IT teams.

Candidates should have a strong background in Linux systems, with experience in production infrastructure and a willingness to travel for customer deployments. This position offers benefits like comprehensive health coverage and unlimited PTO.

Qualifications

• Strong Linux systems expertise is required.
• Experience in production infrastructure troubleshooting is a must.
• Background in DevOps or SRE is preferred.
• Ability to work directly with customers and external teams.

Responsibilities

• Serve as a technical expert for customer-hosted deployments.
• Troubleshoot Linux and infrastructure issues in production.
• Improvements in deployment tooling and automation.
• Partner with customer IT and security teams for successful deployments.

Skills

Linux systems expertise

Production infrastructure troubleshooting

DevOps experience

Strong ownership mentality

Customer interaction skills

Tools

Kubernetes

GitOps workflows

Datacenter automation

Job description

About Nominal

Nominal is building the connected test and operations platform powering the world's most advanced hardware systems, from spacecraft and autonomous vehicles to next-generation defense programs. Our platform gives hardware engineering teams a single place to ingest data, analyze performance, automate test execution, and collaborate across every phase of development, so they can move faster without sacrificing safety or precision. We're a fast-moving team that owns problems end-to-end, works across disciplines, and thrives at the intersection of hardware and software.

We serve top-tier commercial and defense customers, from autonomy leaders such as Anduril and Shield AI to next-generation aerospace teams like Hermeus, REGENT, and performance engineering teams such as Pratt Miller Motorsports. We also work with mission partners within the U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force on programs where failure isn’t an option. We’re backed by Sequoia, General Catalyst, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, and Lightspeed, and our team draws from SpaceX, Palantir, Anduril, Applied Intuition, and other leading companies.

About the Role

Nominal’s self-hosted and on-prem deployments are becoming increasingly critical to our customers’ success. As adoption grows, we balance customer implementations, reliability improvements, FedRAMP readiness, and infrastructure modernization, all while supporting deployments in highly constrained environments. This role sits at the intersection of DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, and customer-facing infrastructure.

What'll You Do

• Serve as a technical expert for customer-hosted and air-gapped deployments
• Travel onsite to support critical customer implementations when additional technical expertise is required
• Troubleshoot Linux, networking, Kubernetes, and infrastructure issues in production environments
• Partner directly with customer IT, infrastructure, and security teams to gather requirements and ensure successful deployments
• Build and improve deployment tooling, automation, and operational processes
• Improve reliability, observability, and maintainability across our self-hosted infrastructure
• Develop deployment documentation, runbooks, and troubleshooting guides
• Help shape Nominal’s long-term strategy for self-hosted and regulated deployments

Must Have

• Strong Linux systems expertise
• Experience operating and troubleshooting production infrastructure
• Background in DevOps, SRE, Platform Engineering, or Infrastructure Engineering
• Ability to independently debug complex systems across multiple layers of the stack
• Comfort working directly with customers and external stakeholders
• Willingness to travel for customer deployments
• Strong ownership mentality and ability to operate in ambiguous environments

Strong Pluses

• Active security clearance or ability and willingness to obtain and maintain one
• Experience with Kubernetes in production environments
• GitOps workflows and tooling (Flux, Helm, Kustomize)
• Infrastructure as Code experience
• Datacenter operations experience
• Hardware procurement, provisioning, or lifecycle management
• Networking expertise (routing, switching, troubleshooting, performance tuning)
• Linux kernel, networking, or performance optimization experience
• Security-focused infrastructure experience including TLS and certificate management
• Experience supporting air-gapped, classified, or highly regulated environments

Skills That Supercharge Us

Bare Metal & Provisioning

• PXE
• IPMI
• BMC
• iLO / iDRAC
• MAAS
• Tinkerbell
• Metal provisioning workflows

Systems

• Linux internals
• Kernel troubleshooting
• NUMA
• RDMA
• SR-IOV
• eBPF

Networking

• BGP
• Routing
• Low-latency networking
• NIC offloading
• DPDK

Storage

• Ceph
• NVMe
• Distributed storage systems

Infrastructure

• Kubernetes
• GitOps
• Datacenter automation
• Rack provisioning
• Hardware orchestration
• On-prem infrastructure operations

Benefits

• 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Unlimited PTO and sick leave
• Free lunch, snacks, and coffee
• Professional Development Stipend
• In-office hardware lab with a $250 project stipend
• Annual company retreat

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin.

ITAR Requirements

To conform to U.S. Government export regulations, applicant must be a (i) U.S. citizen or national, (ii) U.S. lawful permanent resident (aka green card holder), (iii) refugee under 8 U.S.C. § 1157, or (iv) asylee under 8 U.S.C. § 1158, or be eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State. Learn more about the ITAR here.

Compensation

The base pay range for this role is $120,000 – $230,000 per year.