Staff Engineer, AI Agents Platform

Nominal; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 170,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

100% coverage of medical, dental, and視

Unlimited PTO and sick leaveFree lunch

Professional Development Stipend

Annual company retreat

Job summary

Nominal in Austin, TX is seeking a Staff Engineer to design Nominal's agent platform. You will architect the MCP, define direction, and lead a team of engineers building AI-native agent systems for hardware workloads.

You'll work on orchestration, tool layers, context retrieval, and model routing, with a strong emphasis on reliability, scalability, and production readiness. The role blends systems, AI, and platform thinking in a fast-growing hardware AI startup.

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) 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

LLM/agent systems

Distributed systems

Technical leadership

Agent architecture

Production systems

Tools

Claude Code

Cursor

Codex

Job description

Nominal in Austin, TX is seeking a Staff Engineer to design Nominal's agent platform. You will architect the MCP, define direction, and lead a team of engineers building AI-native agent systems for hardware workloads.

You'll work on orchestration, tool layers, context retrieval, and model routing, with a strong emphasis on reliability, scalability, and production readiness. The role blends systems, AI, and platform thinking in a fast-growing hardware AI startup.