Product Manager - Run & Scale Reliably

About Nominal

Engineers today are building some of the most ambitious machines humanity has ever seen. They should have AI that’s purpose-built for them.

Nominal is building the Hardware Intelligence Platform that gives engineers increased visibility into complex physical systems, helps them make better decisions, and ultimately gets their products into the real world faster. It brings together the systems, data, intelligence, and applications hardware engineering requires to meet the AI moment. Hardware engineering teams use Nominal to simulate, test, manufacture, and operate the physical systems that keep the world moving, from spacecraft and autonomous vehicles to next-generation energy systems and robotics.

Our customers span aerospace, defense, manufacturing, transportation, energy, and robotics. They include Anduril, Shield AI, Wisk Aero, Pratt Miller Motorsports, Antares, and Shinkei Systems, amongst others, alongside programs within the U.S. Air Force and Navy. Our team draws from SpaceX, Palantir, Anduril, Applied Intuition, Tesla, and other leading companies, united by a common mission: giving hardware engineers the tools to build the future with speed, safety, and confidence. We're a fast-moving team that owns problems end-to-end, works across disciplines, and thrives at the intersection of hardware and software.

Some of the world’s leading technology investors, including Sequoia, Lightspeed, Founders Fund, General Catalyst, Lux Capital, and Insight Partners, are backing Nominal’s ambition to change how machines are built and operated. We’re looking for teammates who want to take on hard problems and help make a new generation of world-changing hardware possible.

🧭 About the role

Production adoption depends on customers trusting Nominal to run predictably at scale. This PM owns the customer journey for operating Nominal reliably across the deployment options customers prefer: fully managed, bring-your-own-cloud (BYOC), and self-hosted. You'll help administrators and developers configure capacity, observe health, recover from incidents, and scale.

This role is ideal for a PM who has owned cloud infrastructure, database, or reliability journeys and can navigate ambiguous technical decisions with Engineering and customers. You'll shape which operational problems matter most across deployment models and push the team toward the right design.

🚀 What you'll do

• Own experiences for provisioning, cluster configuration, capacity management, workload health, and operational controls.
• Design self-service workflows for starting, pausing, and resizing dedicated clusters, with clear guardrails and feedback.
• Partner with infrastructure Engineering on reliability, performance, availability, backup, recovery, and operational transparency.
• Define how the product serves multi-tenant, dedicated single-tenant, BYOC, and self-hosted needs without unnecessary complexity.
• Translate operational failure modes and support insights into prioritized customer-facing improvements.
• Define and track journey metrics such as time to operational readiness, successful configuration, reliability, and recovery experience.
• Explore AI-assisted diagnostics and operational guidance with human control and safety.

🔍 We're looking for someone with

• Prior ownership of the roadmap for a cloud infrastructure, database, or developer-platform product.
• Experience shipping a capacity management, observability, backup and recovery, or availability feature for a production service.
• A track record of turning operational failure data, such as incidents, support escalations, or SLO misses, into customer-facing improvements that shipped.
• Depth in operational metrics, shown by journey or service metrics you defined and reported, such as time to provision, configuration success rate, or uptime.
• Experience owning a product area that spanned multiple engineering teams.

⚡ Skills that supercharge us

• A background in products built on Kubernetes, a managed database, or a workload scheduler.
• Experience shipping or supporting a product's first single-tenant, self-hosted, or BYOC deployment.
• Hands-on use of SLOs or infrastructure automation for a service you owned.

✨ Benefits/Perks

• 🏥 100% covered health, dental, and vision insurance (for you and your family)
• 🏖️ Unlimited paid vacation
• 👶 12 weeks parental leave
• 🌱 Fertility and family planning ($15,000 lifetime)
• 🍽️ Lunch provided daily
• 💪 Wellness stipend ($100/month)
• 🛠️ $500/year hardware sensor stipend
• 🚀 Learning and development stipend
• 💼 401(k)
• 📈 Employee-friendly equity terms
• 🏢 In-office 5 days per week

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 $204,000 – $240,000 per year.