Lead Software Engineer, Backend - Growth & Monetization

Nominal•Los Angeles, CA

20h•Onsite

About The Position

Nominal is hiring a product-minded backend engineer to set the technical direction for its Growth & Monetization team. The role works across product engineering, infrastructure, and business strategy, supporting the customer journey from self-serve signup and onboarding through pricing, billing, product discovery, and customer value realization. The team is exploring AI-powered ways to personalize onboarding, guide platform adoption, communicate customer value, and automate business value assessments for renewals and expansion. The position owns the systems that support this journey, including metering, billing, entitlements, provisioning, and self-serve expansion infrastructure. The engineer will identify growth constraints, determine which opportunities are worth pursuing, set goals, and take responsibility for both business outcomes and technical decisions. They will be hands-on designing, building, and operating foundational systems, while working closely with product, design, go-to-market leadership, and business leaders. As the team grows, the role may develop into team leadership, but its initial focus is building the foundation. Nominal builds a Hardware Intelligence Platform for engineers working on complex physical systems. Its customers operate in aerospace, defense, manufacturing, transportation, energy, and robotics. The company describes itself as a fast-moving, cross-disciplinary team focused on helping hardware engineers build products with speed, safety, and confidence.

Requirements

At least 5 years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production backend systems.
Experience setting technical direction for a domain such as billing, metering, or entitlements, rather than only for an individual project.
Strong experience in Go, Rust, or Java, with an emphasis on correctness, clarity, and long-lived systems.
Experience tech-leading a team or formally mentoring engineers, setting standards, and being accountable for group delivery.
Experience serving as a decision-maker for a technical domain and owning tradeoffs across engineering, product, and finance.
Deep understanding of distributed systems and data modeling for systems that require correctness, such as billing and entitlements.
Ability to identify opportunities from data, run experiments, and measure effects on customer adoption and business growth.
Ability to explain technical decisions to engineers and business leaders, and to design, build, ship, and operate owned systems.

Nice To Haves

Experience with billing, metering, payments, or usage-based pricing infrastructure.
Experience with event-driven architectures, notification systems, or lifecycle messaging.
Familiarity with product-led growth, experimentation, or self-serve SaaS.
Experience building AI-powered applications, agents, or workflow automation.
Experience managing engineers or helping build a team from scratch, with interest in doing so again.

Responsibilities

Set technical strategy and own the roadmap for metering, billing, entitlements, pricing, and packaging.
Identify technical and product constraints across acquisition, activation, retention, and monetization; prioritize opportunities and measure their business impact.
Design, build, ship, and operate the initial infrastructure for the team, establishing patterns for future engineers.
Build systems to measure product adoption, quantify business outcomes, and support automated business value assessments and customer-facing insights.
Own systems for self-serve signup, onboarding, account provisioning, payments, and activation.
Build notification and messaging infrastructure for feature announcements, contextual guidance, and personalized adoption nudges.
Develop AI-powered agents and systems that personalize onboarding, surface adoption opportunities, and automate customer-facing workflows.
Establish engineering standards, review practices, and operating norms, and help shape future hiring as the team grows.