Forward Deployed Engineer, AI

Nominal•Los Angeles, CA

22h•Onsite

About The Position

As an AI Forward Deployed Engineer, you'll embed with hardware teams, build agentic workflows and skills on Nominal, and bring back the patterns that should become product. This role is part of the Hardware Intelligence team, which is responsible for Nominal's agents, AI-native applications, and MCP, and its forward-leaning AI bets. The team's mission is to unlock the bottlenecks of the hardware lifecycle with AI, where agents reason over physical reality and real test results serve as ground truth. The team is collaborative, iterative, high-agency, human-centered, and customer-focused, constantly building with and adapting to the newest AI tools.

Requirements

4+ years as a software engineer, with strong Python and data skills.
Hands-on experience building agentic workflows: tool use, prompting, skills, and checking whether they actually work.
Comfort in front of customers: you can run a working session with senior engineers and earn their trust.
A builder's instinct for what's reusable and what's one-off.
Willingness to travel to customer sites.
You build with modern AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex) every day, and stay curious and open to better ways of working.

Nice To Haves

You've been a test, flight test, controls, or hardware engineer before moving into software.
You've been a forward-deployed or solutions engineer at an AI or data company.
You've turned a one-off customer build into a reusable product feature.
You hold an active security clearance, or can obtain one.

Responsibilities

Embed with hardware engineering teams at build-partner programs, on site and alongside them.
Build custom agentic workflows and skills for each partner's programs that do real engineering work: turning requirements and test plans into checks, running analyses, and investigating issues.
Spot the patterns across customers and bring them back as product: new skills, agent capabilities, and eval tasks.
Win build partners by proving value: measured before-and-after results on real programs.
Be the technical voice of the customer inside the Hardware Intelligence team.