Software Engineer, Runtime Infrastructure

Nominal; Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 179,000 - 310,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

Unlimited PTO

Free lunch, snacks, and coffee

Professional development stipend

In-office hardware lab with stipend

Annual company retreat

Parental leave

Wellness stipend

Hardware sensor stipend

401(k)

Employee equity terms

In-office 5 days per week

Job summary

Nominal is hiring a Software Engineer for Runtime Infrastructure to build the foundation that other engineering teams rely on. You will shape service frameworks, libraries, and APIs, focusing on reliability, observability, and secure defaults.

You’ll work across backend, frontend, platform, and deployment teams, with strong ownership and autonomy to ship robust systems. You’ll investigate concurrency, memory, and latency, develop runtime metrics and load testing tools, and translate findings

Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience designing and running production systems where performance, reliability, and operability matter.
• Experience designing libraries, frameworks, or APIs that other engineers build on; hide complexity behind simple interfaces and safe defaults.
• Hands-on experience with observability tools (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Datadog) including metrics, traces, and alerts.

Responsibilities

• Build the foundation other engineers stand on: libraries, services, and APIs that are reliable, observable, and easy to operate from first commit.
• Investigate concurrency, memory, and latency issues; develop runtime metrics, profiling, and load testing, and turn findings into fixes.
• Collaborate with product, frontend, platform, and deployment teams; maintain strong ownership and ship-ready systems.

Skills

Backend or full stack engineering

Rust/Java/TypeScript

Observability tooling

Concurrency & async

System design

Communication

Ownership

Tools

OpenTelemetry

Prometheus

Datadog

Job description

Software Engineer, Runtime Infrastructure

New York, NY • Los Angeles, CA • Austin, TX • Seattle, WA

Software Engineering

In office

Full-time

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.

Join Nominal as a Software Engineer, Runtime Infrastructure

Nominal runs mission‑critical software wherever our customers need it: in our cloud, in theirs, and on disconnected networks for defense programs. An engineer might be watching a vehicle in real time or working through terabytes of post‑test data. Either way, every layer between the hardware and the chart on their screen has to be fast and correct. Our customers expect a lot from us on reliability, security, and compliance. Runtime Infrastructure builds the libraries, services, and standards that let every Nominal team meet that bar by default.

As a Software Engineer on Runtime Infrastructure, you'll build the foundation the rest of engineering builds on. That covers how our services and applications are observed, how they record who did what, how they talk to each other, and how they behave under load and failure. Your main users are other Nominal engineers. If you do this well, they ship faster, catch problems sooner, and meet our customers’ standards without having to think about it. Through them, your work reaches the aerospace, defense, and autonomy teams who use Nominal for mission‑critical testing.

We're hiring both backend and full stack engineers for this team. You'll build services, libraries, and APIs that have to be correct, fast, and long‑lived. You'll care about architecture across the whole stack: how our web applications are structured, how they talk to the backend, and how they behave in production. You'll have a lot of autonomy and work closely with product, frontend, platform, and deployment engineers. You'll help shape the requirements yourself, with input from fellow engineers and our customers, and make the tradeoffs that decide how our systems are built. You'll also be able to contribute to the open source projects we depend on.

About the role

Build the foundation other engineers stand on

Build the service frameworks and shared libraries that every Nominal service starts from: configuration, health checks, graceful shutdown, resource limits, resilience, secure defaults, and the conventions for how services define their APIs and talk to each other. The goal is that a new service is reliable, observable, and compliant from its first commit. You'll measure success by how quickly other engineers can ship, debug, and operate their own services.

Find where the time and memory go

Investigate concurrency, memory, and latency problems across our services. You'll build runtime metrics, profiling, and load testing, then turn what you find into fixes, and into tools other engineers can use on their own.

Success in this role comes from treating other engineers as your customers. You'll spend as much time understanding how teams build, run, and debug software as you will writing code.

We’d love to hear from you if you have

• 3+ years of experience as a backend or full stack engineer, building and running production systems where performance, reliability, and operational simplicity matter.
• Strong experience in at least one of Rust, Java, or TypeScript, with an emphasis on correctness, clarity, and long‑lived systems. You don't need all three, but you should be excited to work across them.
• Experience designing libraries, frameworks, or APIs that other engineers build on: hiding complexity behind simple interfaces, sensible defaults, and changing things without breaking the people who depend on you.
• Hands‑on experience with observability tools such as OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, or Datadog, including metrics, traces, and alerts that engineers actually rely on.
• A solid understanding of concurrency, async runtimes, networking, and how distributed systems behave under load and failure.
• A systems mindset. You like working out how a system should behave, and how it will fail, before you build it.
• Excellent communication skills, and the ability to explain technical tradeoffs clearly to the engineers who depend on your work.
• A bias toward ownership: you design it, build it, ship it, and run it.

Skills that supercharge us

Security & Compliance

• Experience building audit logging, access controls, data‑handling safeguards, or other systems that help a company meet security and compliance requirements.

API Design

• Experience with schema‑driven APIs and RPC frameworks, code generation, and keeping APIs compatible as many teams build on them.

Distributed Tracing

• Experience instrumenting services and following a request across process, network, and browser boundaries.

Performance Engineering

• Experience profiling CPU and memory, load testing, and turning measurements into concrete improvements.

Resilience Patterns

• Experience with backpressure, bulkheads, rate limiting, retries, and graceful degradation in production systems.

Developer Experience

• A track record of building tools, libraries, or platforms that made other engineers more productive.

Async Rust

• Experience with Tokio or similar, and a feel for what the runtime is doing under the hood.

Frontend Architecture

• Experience designing how large TypeScript/React applications are structured: data fetching, caching, state management, and the API boundaries they depend on.

Benefits/Perks

• 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
• 12 weeks parental leave
• Fertility and family planning ($15,000 lifetime)
• Wellness stipend ($100/month)
• $500/year hardware sensor stipend
• 401(k)
• 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.

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 $179,000 – $310,000 per year.