Software Engineer - Backend

About Nominal

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.

About the role 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.

🚀 What you'll do:

• Architect and evolve distributed systems that ingest, process, and persist high-frequency telemetry and sensor data.
• Design storage and indexing strategies for large, time-series, and event-driven datasets with strict performance and correctness requirements.
• Tackle hard problems around scalability, backpressure, fault tolerance, and data consistency in real-time systems.
• Optimize hot paths, reduce tail latency, and improve reliability as the system scales with new customers and use cases.
• Collaborate closely with product, infrastructure, and customer-facing engineers to solve domain-specific problems for cutting-edge hardware teams.
• Influence backend architecture and technical direction, mentor teammates, and raise the bar for system design across the org.

🔍 We're looking for someone with

• 3+ years building distributed systems where performance, reliability, and operational simplicity matter.
• Strong experience in Go, Rust, or Java, with an emphasis on correctness, clarity, and long-lived systems.
• Deep familiarity with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and production tooling like Kubernetes, Docker, and Terraform.
• Hands-on experience designing or operating storage systems: time-series databases, columnar formats, or analytics engines (e.g., ClickHouse, TimescaleDB, Druid, InfluxDB, Parquet).
• Experience with streaming or data processing technologies such as Kafka, Apache Arrow, Flink, or Spark.
• Comfort reasoning about distributed systems tradeoffs: latency vs. throughput, consistency vs. availability, abstraction vs. control.
• Clear technical communication and a bias toward ownership: you design it, build it, ship it, and operate it.

✨ Benefits/Perks

• 🏥 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance
• 🏖️ Unlimited PTO and sick leave
• 🍽️ Free lunch, snacks, and coffee
• 🚀 Professional Development Stipend
• 🛠️ In-office hardware lab with a $250 project 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.

ITAR Requirements 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.

Compensation The base pay range for this role is $130,000 – $230,000 per year.