Nominal powers mission-critical engineering with advanced data infrastructure, real-time observability, and analysis tools — all in one collaborative platform. Backed by General Catalyst, Lightspeed and Sequoia.
About the role
As a Staff Research Engineer supporting agent evals & post-training, you'll define how Nominal measures its agents, for customers and for ourselves, and build the path from evals to post-trained models when hardware needs them. Evals come first; post-training follows when air-gapped deployment or cost makes it the right investment. Found on 1752vc Careers, the job board for startup and VC roles.
What they're looking for
- Build eval suites for our agents, the MCP tool layer, and our internal company agent, grounded in real hardware tasks
- Invent new benchmarks for agents working over physical engineering data, where none exist today
- Benchmark our agents against frontier agents using our MCP, and show where and why ours win
- Build the eval infrastructure: datasets, model-based and human graders, and regression gates in CI
- Turn evals into reward signals and training data, and lead post-training (fine-tuning, RL, distillation) when we need models we can run anywhere, including air-gapped environments
- Set Nominal's strategy for measurement and model improvement, working with hardware experts on what "correct" means
More about this role
Our mission is to accelerate how the world engineers new hardware. Nominal's connected test and operations platform powers the world's most advanced hardware programs and its most ambitious startups, from spacecraft, racecars, and autonomous vehicles to next-generation defense and energy programs. Our customers include Anduril, Shield AI, Hermeus, Albedo, Shinkei, and Pratt Miller Motorsports, as well as U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force programs. Now we're expanding across the entire hardware lifecycle, building the foundation, AI-native applications, and agents that accelerate innovators' work and change what's possible to build.
We're backed by Sequoia, General Catalyst, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, and Lightspeed, and our team comes from SpaceX, Apple, Palantir, Anduril, Applied Intuition, and other leading companies.
We're the team behind Nominal's agents, AI-native applications, and MCP, and its forward-leaning AI bets. Our mission is to unlock the bottlenecks of the hardware lifecycle with AI. Our agents reason over physical reality, from high-rate telemetry and test campaigns to designs and simulations, where real test results are the ground truth their work is checked against....
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