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. 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 serve top-tier commercial and defense customers, from autonomy leaders like Anduril and Shield AI to next-generation aerospace teams like Hermeus and REGENT, and performance engineering teams like Pratt Miller Motorsports, alongside mission partners within the U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force on programs where failure isn’t an option. We’re backed by Sequoia, General Catalyst, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, and Lightspeed. Our team draws from SpaceX, Palantir, Anduril, Applied Intuition, 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 looking for a Baremetal Infrastructure Engineer to join our team building high-scale, mission-critical infrastructure for advanced hardware systems. You'll be on the front lines deploying Nominal's software to our most demanding customers, including USG customers operating in restricted environments, owning runbooks, building deployment collateral, and working shoulder-to-shoulder with customer hardware engineers and the IT teams they need to satisfy.

🚀 About the role

Nominal's self-hosted and on-prem deployments are becoming increasingly critical to our customers' success. As adoption grows, we're balancing customer implementations, reliability improvements, FedRAMP readiness, and infrastructure modernization, all while supporting deployments in highly constrained environments.

We're looking for someone who can become our in-house expert on Linux systems, bare metal infrastructure, and deployment reliability. You'll help customers deploy and operate Nominal in their own environments while also driving the internal improvements that make those deployments more repeatable, observable, and scalable.

This role sits at the intersection of DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, and customer-facing infrastructure. One day you might be debugging networking issues on a customer rack. The next, you might be building provisioning automation, improving Kubernetes upgrade paths, or implementing observability features that eliminate future support burdens.

You'll be a force multiplier for the team, reducing context switching, accelerating customer deployments, and helping us build a world-class self-hosted platform.

👨🏻‍💻 What You'll Do

Serve as a technical expert for customer-hosted and air-gapped deployments
Travel onsite to support critical customer implementations when additional technical expertise is required
Troubleshoot Linux, networking, Kubernetes, and infrastructure issues in production environments
Partner directly with customer IT, infrastructure, and security teams to gather requirements and ensure successful deployments
Build and improve deployment tooling, automation, and operational processes
Improve reliability, observability, and maintainability across our self-hosted infrastructure
Develop deployment documentation, runbooks, and troubleshooting guides
Help shape Nominal's long-term strategy for self-hosted and regulated deployments

🔍 We're Looking For

Must Have:

Strong Linux systems expertise
Experience operating and troubleshooting production infrastructure
Background in DevOps, SRE, Platform Engineering, or Infrastructure Engineering
Ability to independently debug complex systems across multiple layers of the stack
Comfort working directly with customers and external stakeholders
Willingness to travel for customer deployments
Strong ownership mentality and ability to operate in ambiguous environments

Strong Pluses:

Active security clearance or ability and willingness to obtain and maintain one
Experience with Kubernetes in production environments
GitOps workflows and tooling (Flux, Helm, Kustomize, etc.)
Infrastructure as Code experience
Datacenter operations experience
Hardware procurement, provisioning, or lifecycle management
Networking expertise (routing, switching, troubleshooting, performance tuning)
Linux kernel, networking, or performance optimization experience
Security-focused infrastructure experience including TLS and certificate management
Experience supporting air-gapped, classified, or highly regulated environments

⚡ Skills That Supercharge Us

Bare Metal & Provisioning

PXE
IPMI
BMC
iLO / iDRAC
MAAS
Tinkerbell
Metal provisioning workflows

Systems

Linux internals
Kernel troubleshooting
NUMA
RDMA
SR-IOV
eBPF

Networking

BGP
Routing
Low-latency networking
NIC offloading
DPDK

Storage

Ceph
NVMe
Distributed storage systems

Infrastructure

Kubernetes
GitOps
Datacenter automation
Rack provisioning
Hardware orchestration
On-prem infrastructure operations

✨ Benefits/Perks

🏥 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

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.

Baremetal Infrastructure Engineer

Job Description