Software Engineer - Backend

About the role

Nominal is building the connected test and operations platform powering the world's most advanced hardware systems. This role is ideal for engineers who enjoy working close to the metal of distributed systems and who want to see their work directly enable real-world hardware.

Responsibilities

• Architect and evolve distributed systems that ingest, process, and persist high-frequency telemetry and sensor data.
• Design and implement 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, mentoring teammates, and raising the bar for system design across the org.

Requirements

• 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.

Qualifications

• Clear technical communication and a bias toward ownership: you design it, build it, ship it, and operate it.

Skills

• Experience with distributed systems and microservices architecture.
• Knowledge of NoSQL databases and distributed systems concepts.
• Experience with cloud platforms and containerization technologies.
• Understanding of concurrency, parallelism, and distributed computing principles.

Benefits

• 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

Compensation

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