Production Engineer

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.

What You’ll Do

• Drive reliability and observability improvements across large-scale distributed systems.
• Serve as a force multiplier across all engineering teams by reducing downtime, improving tooling, and freeing up senior engineers from firefighting.
• Own and evolve our incident review process, leading postmortems, and embedding learnings into tools, practices, and culture across the company.
• Collaborate with teams to improve release hygiene, including:
• Automating release gating (e.g., ensuring code bakes in staging for appropriate windows),
• preventing code from stagnating in staging environments,
• implementing pre-prod automated test pipelines to catch issues early.
• Build and maintain Nominal’s gRPC middleware to ensure safe, observable, and performant service communication.
• Improve alerting, debugging, and monitoring to ensure production health and rapid root cause analysis.

Who You Are

• You have 5+ years of experience in software engineering with a strong focus on production systems and distributed architectures.
• You thrive in high-leverage roles that improve how everyone else builds, ships, and fixes software.
• You’ve led or played a significant role in incident response, building systems, and culture around continuous improvement.
• You’re excited by complexity, not afraid of it, and you’re deeply motivated to make systems safer and teams faster.

Skills That Supercharge Us

• Experience working on distributed systems at scale.
• Hands-on experience with Kafka/Redpanda, PostgreSQL or other SQL databases, MongoDB/NoSQL databases, Clickhouse or other OLAP databases.
• Deep understanding of release automation, CI/CD, and code lifecycle management.
• Familiarity with gRPC and experience building shared infrastructure components like middleware.
• A systems mindset—you understand the ripple effects of a single bug and know how to design to prevent 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 retreats

Compensation

The base pay range for this role is $150,000 – $265,000 per year.