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 Engineer supporting agents, you'll design how Nominal's agents work: you'll architect the one platform our agents, the Nominal MCP, and our internal agent all run on, and set technical direction for the team that builds on it. Found on 1752vc Careers, the job board for startup and VC roles.
What they're looking for
- Design and build the agent harness: orchestration, planning, tool calling, memory, and background agents that run long investigations on their own
- Own the shared tool layer that our agents and external agents (via MCP) both use, so every capability we build works everywhere
- Build how agents assemble context: retrieval across test data, documents, designs, and simulations, including sensor data far too large to fit in a context window
- Make model choice a decision, not a dependency: routing, cost, latency, and fallbacks across frontier models
- Partner with evals to make quality measurable, and with the platform team on how the context layer grows
- Set the architecture other engineers build on, and raise the bar through design reviews and mentorship
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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