Staff Software Engineer, Agents

Nominal; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

100% coverage of medical, dental, and视

Unlimited PTO and sick leave

Free lunch, snacks, and coffee

Professional Development Stipend

Annual company retreat

Job summary

Nominal is seeking a Staff Software Engineer, Agents to design and own the platform that powers our AI agents and the Nominal MCP. This role is in-office across multiple cities including San Francisco, with a focus on architecture and hands-on delivery.

You will lead the technical direction, orchestrate the agent harness, and mentor engineers while collaborating with cross-functional teams to ship robust agent capabilities.

Qualifications

• 8+ years building production systems and shipping LL.M/agent products
• Strong distributed-systems and backend fundamentals
• Opinions about agent architecture and the judgment to change them when data says so
• Track record of setting technical direction across a team
• Build with modern AI coding agents and stay curious about better ways of working

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) use
• Build how agents assemble context: retrieval across test data, documents, designs, and simulations
• Make model choice a decision, not a dependency: routing, cost, latency, and fallbacks across frontier models
• Partner with evals to measure quality 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 fundamentals

Agent architecture

Technical leadership

AI coding agents

Tools

Claude Code

Cursor

Codex

Job description

Staff Software Engineer, Agents

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

AI

In office

Full-time

About Nominal

Our mission is to accelerate how the world engineers new hardware. Nominal's connected test and operations platform powers the world's most advanced hardware programs and its most ambitious startups, from spacecraft, racecars, and autonomous vehicles to next-generation defense and energy programs. Our customers include Anduril, Shield AI, Hermeus, Albedo, Shinkei, and Pratt Miller Motorsports, as well as U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force programs. Now we're expanding across the entire hardware lifecycle, building the foundation, AI-native applications, and agents that accelerate innovators' work and change what's possible to build.

We're backed by Sequoia, General Catalyst, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, and Lightspeed, and our team comes from SpaceX, Apple, Palantir, Anduril, Applied Intuition, and other leading companies.

About Hardware Intelligence

We're the team behind Nominal's agents, AI-native applications, and MCP, and its forward-leaning AI bets. Our mission is to unlock the bottlenecks of the hardware lifecycle with AI. Our agents reason over physical reality, from high-rate telemetry and test campaigns to designs and simulations, where real test results are the ground truth their work is checked against. We believe opinionated AI, built for the real work of hardware programs, will change how the world engineers.

We're collaborative, iterative, and high-agency, and we're human-centered and customer-focused. We build with the newest AI tools every day, and because those tools keep changing, so do we: we stay curious and keep looking for the better way. Our team spans data science and ML, distributed systems, search, and knowledge systems, and we obsess over how agents can be genuinely useful to the engineers who rely on them.

The Role:

As a Staff Engineer supporting agents, you'll design how Nominal's agents work: you'll architect the one platform our agents, the Nominal MCP, and our internal agent all run on, and set technical direction for the team that builds on it.

What You'll Do:

• 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.

What you'll bring:

• 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.

Nice to have:

• You've built an agent harness or LLM platform that other engineers or customers build on, at an AI-native company.
• You've shipped long-running, autonomous agents to production and know where they break.
• You've contributed to MCP, agent frameworks, or open-source LLM infrastructure.
• You've built software for physical systems: robots, vehicles, aircraft, or the test stands behind them.

Benefits/Perks

• 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Unlimited PTO and sick leave
• Free lunch, snacks, and coffee
• Professional Development 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.

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.