Software Engineer - Backend

Nominal is building the connected test and operations platform powering the world's most advanced hardware systems, from spacecraft and autonomous vehicles to next-generation defense programs. Our platform gives hardware engineering teams a single place to ingest data, analyze performance, automate test execution, and collaborate across every phase of development, so they can move faster without sacrificing safety or precision. We're a fast-moving team that owns problems end-to-end, works across disciplines, and thrives at the intersection of hardware and software.

We serve top-tier commercial and defense customers, from autonomy leaders like Anduril and Shield AI to next-generation aerospace teams like Hermeus and REGENT, and performance engineering teams like Pratt Miller Motorsports, alongside mission partners within the U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force on programs where failure isn’t an option. We’re backed by Sequoia, General Catalyst, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, and Lightspeed. Our team draws from SpaceX, Palantir, Anduril, Applied Intuition, and other leading companies, united by a common mission: giving hardware engineers the tools to build the future with speed, safety, and confidence.

Nominal's backend runs on a set of Platform teams that own everything below the product surface: ingesting and storing the world's hardware data, making it queryable at scale, and keeping the whole system running across cloud, on-prem, and air-gapped environments. As a Backend Software Engineer, you'll join one of these teams and design and build the distributed infrastructure that powers the telemetry and validation platform, systems that ingest multi-modal data (time series, video, point clouds, asset and run catalogs), serve it back at high scale, and hold up under real production load from customers.

This role is ideal for engineers who enjoy working close to the metal of distributed systems, reasoning about throughput, latency, data models, and failure, and who want to see their work directly enable real-world hardware. You'll own critical backend systems end to end, from ingestion pipelines to storage engines to performance tuning in production.

ITAR Requirements