Software Engineer, Runtime Infrastructure

Nominal•Los Angeles, CA

4h•Onsite

About The Position

Nominal is hiring backend and full stack Software Engineers for its Runtime Infrastructure team. Nominal runs mission-critical software in its own cloud, customer clouds, and disconnected networks. The Runtime Infrastructure team builds the libraries, services, and standards that help engineering teams meet demanding reliability, security, and compliance requirements by default. In this role, you will build the foundation used by other Nominal engineers, including systems for observability, auditability, service-to-service communication, and behavior under load and failure. You will develop services, libraries, and APIs, and contribute to architecture across web applications and backend systems. You will work autonomously with product, frontend, platform, and deployment engineers, help define requirements with input from engineers and customers, make system design tradeoffs, and may contribute to open-source projects. You will build service frameworks and shared libraries for configuration, health checks, graceful shutdown, resource limits, resilience, secure defaults, and API and communication conventions. You will investigate concurrency, memory, and latency issues, develop runtime metrics, profiling, and load-testing capabilities, and turn findings into performance improvements and tools for other engineers. Success involves understanding how teams build, run, and debug software, and helping them ship, diagnose, and operate services more effectively.

Requirements

At least 3 years of experience as a backend or full stack engineer building and running production systems where performance, reliability, and operational simplicity matter.
Strong experience in at least one of Rust, Java, or TypeScript, with an emphasis on correctness, clarity, and long-lived systems, and willingness to work across these languages.
Experience designing libraries, frameworks, or APIs for other engineers, including hiding complexity behind simple interfaces, providing sensible defaults, and maintaining compatibility for users.
Hands-on experience with observability tools such as OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, or Datadog, including metrics, traces, and alerts.
Solid understanding of concurrency, asynchronous runtimes, networking, and distributed-system behavior under load and failure.
Systems mindset, including anticipating how a system should behave and how it may fail before building it.
Excellent communication skills and ability to explain technical tradeoffs clearly to dependent engineers.
Ownership-oriented approach: design, build, ship, and operate systems.

Nice To Haves

Experience building audit logging, access controls, data-handling safeguards, or other systems that support security and compliance requirements.
Experience with schema-driven APIs and RPC frameworks, code generation, and maintaining API compatibility across teams.
Experience instrumenting services and tracing requests across process, network, and browser boundaries.
Experience profiling CPU and memory, load testing, and applying measurements to improve performance.
Experience with production resilience patterns such as backpressure, bulkheads, rate limiting, retries, and graceful degradation.
A track record of building tools, libraries, or platforms that improve other engineers' productivity.
Experience with Tokio or similar asynchronous Rust runtimes and understanding of their internals.
Experience designing the architecture of large TypeScript/React applications, including data fetching, caching, state management, and API boundaries.

Responsibilities

Build service frameworks and shared libraries that provide configuration, health checks, graceful shutdown, resource limits, resilience, secure defaults, and conventions for APIs and service communication.
Develop services, libraries, and APIs that are correct, performant, and maintainable over time.
Improve how services and applications are observed and how they record actions and communicate with each other.
Investigate concurrency, memory, and latency issues across services.
Build runtime metrics, profiling, and load-testing capabilities, and use findings to implement improvements and create tools for other engineers.
Help shape requirements and make architectural and system-design tradeoffs with input from fellow engineers and customers.
Work closely with product, frontend, platform, and deployment engineers.
Understand how engineering teams build, run, and debug software, and improve their ability to ship and operate services.
Contribute to open-source projects the company depends on.