Nominal is hiring an AI Forward Deployed Engineer in Austin to embed with hardware engineering teams and build agentic workflows that do real engineering work. You’ll turn requirements and test plans into automated checks, investigate issues, and bring the best patterns back into the product as new skills and agent capabilities.
About Nominal
Mission: Accelerate how the world engineers new hardware
Platform: Connected test and operations software for spacecraft, racecars, autonomous vehicles, defense and energy programs
Customers: Anduril, Shield AI, Hermeus, Albedo, Shinkei, Pratt Miller Motorsports, plus U.S. Navy and Air Force programs
Backers: Sequoia, General Catalyst, Founders Fund, Lux Capital and Lightspeed
About Hardware Intelligence
Focus: The team behind Nominal’s agents, AI-native applications and MCP
Approach: Agents reason over real telemetry, test campaigns, designs and simulations, with real test results as ground truth
Culture: Collaborative, iterative, high-agency and customer-focused, building with the newest AI tools daily
Position Overview
As AI Forward Deployed Engineer, you work side by side with hardware teams at build-partner programs, creating custom agentic workflows for each program. You’ll prove value with measured before-and-after results, and act as the technical voice of the customer inside the Hardware Intelligence team.
Why This Role Matters: Hardware programs move fast and the cost of a missed issue is high. As Forward Deployed Engineer, you turn AI from a demo into trusted engineering tooling, and your customer work directly shapes what Nominal builds next.
Key Responsibilities
- Embed on site with hardware engineering teams at build-partner programs
- Build custom agentic workflows and skills that turn requirements and test plans into checks and analyses
- Investigate issues using agents and real test data
- Spot patterns across customers and bring them back as product features, skills and eval tasks
- Win build partners with measured before-and-after results on real programs
- Represent the customer’s technical voice inside the Hardware Intelligence team
Qualifications & Requirements
- Experience: 4+ years as a software engineer with strong Python and data skills
- AI Skills: Hands-on experience with agentic workflows, tool use, prompting and evaluating results
- Customer Skills: Comfortable running working sessions with senior engineers
- Product Sense: Instinct for what’s reusable versus one-off
- Tools: Daily use of AI coding agents like Claude Code, Cursor or Codex
- Travel: Willingness to travel to customer sites
- Eligibility: ITAR rules apply: U.S. citizen, green card holder, refugee, asylee, or eligible for required authorization
Nice to Have
- Background as a test, flight test, controls or hardware engineer
- Prior forward-deployed or solutions engineering experience at an AI or data company
- Experience turning a custom customer build into a reusable product feature
- Active security clearance, or ability to obtain one
Benefits
100% coverage of medical, dental and vision insurance, unlimited PTO and sick leave, free lunch, snacks and coffee, a professional development stipend, and an annual company retreat.
Who Should Apply?
- Software Engineers: With Python skills who want to build AI agents for real engineering work
- Solutions Engineers: From AI or data companies ready to go deeper technically
- Hardware-Turned-Software Engineers: Who know test and flight programs firsthand
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