Software Engineer, Developer Infrastructure (Build Systems)

Nominal•Los Angeles, CA

About The Position

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 Software Engineer to join Nominal's Developer Infrastructure team. At its core, this is a build systems role. You'll build, optimize, and maintain the infrastructure every engineer at Nominal depends on, with a focus on improving build performance, CI/CD, release automation, and release reliability as our codebase, monorepo, and engineering organization continue to scale. Beyond build systems, you'll own the developer infrastructure that keeps engineering velocity high, including observability, telemetry, logging, and metrics. As one of the founding engineers on the team, you'll shape the tooling, developer experience, and engineering practices that every engineer at Nominal relies on from day one.

Requirements

4+ years building, optimizing, and maintaining build systems at scale.
Experience with Bazel or similar build systems.
Experience working in and scaling large monorepos.
A track record of improving CI/CD performance, release reliability, and developer productivity using measurable outcomes.
Practical, startup-minded engineering philosophy - You don't let perfect be the enemy of good, but you approach problems from first principles and build solutions that scale.
Comfortable owning developer infrastructure end to end, from build tooling and CI/CD to release automation and engineering productivity.

Nice To Haves

Datadog
Grafana
OpenTelemetry
Audit logging
Kubernetes
Remote build caches
Ephemeral development environments, or other developer platform tooling.

Responsibilities

Build, optimize, and maintain Nominal's large-scale build systems, with Bazel as the highest priority.
Improve CI/CD pipeline performance, release automation, and release reliability.
Own developer infrastructure that enables engineering velocity as our monorepo and engineering organization scale.
Build and maintain observability, telemetry, logging, and metrics infrastructure using tools like Datadog, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry.
Partner closely with product engineering teams to remove developer friction and improve day-to-day engineering productivity.