Staff Research Engineer — Hardware Intelligence Architect

Nominal; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

Unlimited PTO

Free lunch and snacks

Professional development stipend

In-office hardware lab with project St

Annual company retreat

12 weeks parental leave

Fertility and family planning benefits

Wellness stipend

Equity and ownership terms

In-office 5 days per week

Job summary

Nominal is seeking an experienced ML researcher/engineer to lead research in Hardware Intelligence. You will set strategic direction, define experiments, and mentor researchers.

You’ll bridge simulation, real-world tests, and agent tools to accelerate engineering outcomes. You’ll own the research agenda, coordinate cross-disciplinary efforts, and push models and agents toward edge deployment while maintaining rigorous evaluation and benchmarks.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in ML research or engineering, with a shipped model or product impact.
• Strong post-training experience in RL, reward models, or verifiers and debugging.
• Statistical rigor in designing experiments and interpreting metrics.
• Clear research taste: selecting impactful problems and discarding the rest.
• Ability to set direction across a team and raise the bar for peers.
• Experience building with AI coding agents and staying adaptable to tooling changes.

Responsibilities

• Set the Hardware Intelligence research agenda and define quarterly goals.
• Represent hardware context in representations for agents (telemetry, tests, designs, simulations).
• Teach agents to use engineers’ tools (CAD, simulation, analysis software).
• Calibrate simulations to real results and plan tests accordingly.
• Build distributed intelligence: coordinating agents across programs and teams.
• Push intelligence to edge with on-device/on-prem/offline models.
• Lead post-training efforts (SFT, RL, distillation) and validate against data.

Skills

ML research leadership

Statistics & experimental design

Research direction setting

AI coding agents

Tools

Claude Code

Cursor

Codex

Job description

Nominal is seeking an experienced ML researcher/engineer to lead research in Hardware Intelligence. You will set strategic direction, define experiments, and mentor researchers.

You’ll bridge simulation, real-world tests, and agent tools to accelerate engineering outcomes. You’ll own the research agenda, coordinate cross-disciplinary efforts, and push models and agents toward edge deployment while maintaining rigorous evaluation and benchmarks.