Staff Software Engineer

Who you are

• 8+ years building production systems, including real experience shipping LLM or agent systems to users
• Strong distributed-systems and backend fundamentals; you've owned systems where reliability mattered
• Opinions about agent architecture (tool design, context management, autonomy, failure handling) and the judgment to change them when data says so
• A track record of setting technical direction across a team and raising the bar for the engineers around you
• You build with modern AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex) every day, and stay curious and open to better ways of working. The tools keep changing, and so do we
• You've built an agent harness or LLM platform that other engineers or customers build on, at an AI-native company
• You've shipped long-running, autonomous agents to production and know where they break
• You've contributed to MCP, agent frameworks, or open-source LLM infrastructure
• You've built software for physical systems: robots, vehicles, aircraft, or the test stands behind them

What the job involves

• As a Staff Engineer supporting agents, you'll design how Nominal's agents work: you'll architect the one platform our agents, the Nominal MCP, and our internal agent all run on, and set technical direction for the team that builds on it
• Design and build the agent harness: orchestration, planning, tool calling, memory, and background agents that run long investigations on their own
• Own the shared tool layer that our agents and external agents (via MCP) both use, so every capability we build works everywhere
• Build how agents assemble context: retrieval across test data, documents, designs, and simulations, including sensor data far too large to fit in a context window
• Make model choice a decision, not a dependency: routing, cost, latency, and fallbacks across frontier models
• Partner with evals to make quality measurable, and with the platform team on how the context layer grows
• Set the architecture other engineers build on, and raise the bar through design reviews and mentorship

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