Mission Development Engineer

Who you are

• You’re graduating in Summer 2027 or sooner and are interested in a full-time position
• You have strong core engineering skills and hands-on experience building software, whether through internships, personal projects, or academic work
• You want to work directly with the people using your software and understand whether what you’ve built is making a difference
• You’re excited to work through open-ended problems, learn unfamiliar systems, and figure out what’s needed to get a solution into use
• You have a personal passion for solving challenging problems and contributing to the future of critical infrastructure
• Your peers would describe you as ambitious, resourceful, and perseverant

What the job involves

• 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’re looking for students with solid engineering fundamentals on track to graduate in Summer 2027 or sooner
• As a Mission Dev (forward deployed software engineering) engineer at Nominal, you’ll work directly with engineers building and testing complex hardware systems like nuclear reactors, rockets, and supersonic aircraft
• You’ll learn how our customers work, understand what’s slowing them down, and build software that helps them move faster
• The role combines hands-on software engineering with product judgment: figuring out what to build, shipping it, and working with users to make sure it solves their problem
• Work directly with customer engineers to understand their testing and analysis workflows and identify problems you can solve with software
• Design and build integrations, data pipelines, and applications that connect Nominal to our customers’ systems and help them work with high-frequency, high-volume hardware data
• Own projects from understanding the problem through building, deploying, and supporting the solution, with mentorship from experienced engineers and domain experts
• Put working software in users’ hands early, learn from how they use it, and iterate quickly based on their feedback
• Bring what you learn back to our product and engineering teams, helping turn solutions for individual customers into capabilities that benefit many

Benefits

• 100% covered health, dental, and vision insurance (for you and family)
• $500/year hardware sensor stipend
• 12-weeks parental leave
• In-office 5 days per week
• 401K
• Employee-friendly equity terms
• Unlimited paid vacation
• Wellness Stipend ($100/mo)
• Fertility and family planning ($15,000 lifetime)
• Learning & development stipend
• Gourmet lunch provided daily