Staff Engineer, AI-Native Agent Platform

Nominal; Los Angeles (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; 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 is seeking a Staff Engineer to lead the design of its agent platform and MCP, shaping how our AI-powered agents operate on a unified platform. You will drive architecture for tooling, context, and reliable back-end systems used by internal and external agents.

This role emphasizes mentorship and setting technical direction across teams. You will work with modern AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex) daily, tackle long-running agent workloads, and push the boundaries of

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.

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

Distributed systems

Backend engineering

Agent architecture

Technical leadership

AI coding agents

Production systems

Mentorship

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science

Tools

Claude Code

Cursor

Codex

Job description

Nominal is seeking a Staff Engineer to lead the design of its agent platform and MCP, shaping how our AI-powered agents operate on a unified platform. You will drive architecture for tooling, context, and reliable back-end systems used by internal and external agents.

This role emphasizes mentorship and setting technical direction across teams. You will work with modern AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex) daily, tackle long-running agent workloads, and push the boundaries of