Baremetal Infrastructure Engineer

About Nominal

Engineers today are building some of the most ambitious machines humanity has ever seen. They should have AI that's purpose-built for them.

Nominal is building the Hardware Intelligence Platform that gives engineers increased visibility into complex physical systems, helps them make better decisions, and ultimately gets their products into the real world faster. It brings together the systems, data, intelligence, and applications hardware engineering requires to meet the AI moment. Hardware engineering teams use Nominal to simulate, test, manufacture, and operate the physical systems that keep the world moving, from spacecraft and autonomous vehicles to next-generation energy systems and robotics.

Our customers span aerospace, defense, manufacturing, transportation, energy, and robotics. They include Anduril, Shield AI, Wisk Aero, Pratt Miller Motorsports, Antares, and Shinkei Systems, amongst others, alongside programs within the U.S. Air Force and Navy. Our team draws from SpaceX, Palantir, Anduril, Applied Intuition, Tesla, 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 a fast-moving team that owns problems end-to-end, works across disciplines, and thrives at the intersection of hardware and software.

Some of the world's leading technology investors, including Sequoia, Lightspeed, Founders Fund, General Catalyst, Lux Capital, and Insight Partners, are backing Nominal's ambition to change how machines are built and operated. We're looking for engineers who want to take on hard problems and help make a new generation of world-changing hardware possible.

We're looking for a Baremetal Infrastructure Engineer to join our team building high-scale, mission-critical infrastructure for advanced hardware systems. You'll be owning deployment of Nominal's software to our most demanding customers, including USG customers operating in restricted environments, writing runbooks, speccing hardware, building deployment collateral, and collaborating with IT teams to satisfy a wide variety of technical requirements.

About the role

Nominal's self-hosted and on-prem deployments are becoming increasingly critical to our customers' success. As adoption grows, we're balancing customer implementations, reliability improvements, FedRAMP readiness, and infrastructure modernization, all while supporting deployments in highly constrained environments.

We're looking for someone who can become our in-house expert on Linux systems, bare metal infrastructure, and deployment reliability. You'll help customers deploy and operate Nominal in their own environments while also driving the internal improvements that make those deployments more repeatable, observable, and scalable.

This role sits at the intersection of DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, and customer-facing infrastructure. One day you might be debugging networking issues on a customer rack. The next, you might be building provisioning automation, improving Kubernetes upgrade paths, or implementing observability features that eliminate future support burdens.

You'll be a force multiplier for the team, reducing context switching, accelerating customer deployments, and helping us build a world-class self-hosted platform.

What You'll Do

• Serve as a technical expert for customer-hosted and air-gapped deployments
• Travel onsite to support critical customer implementations when additional technical expertise is required
• Troubleshoot Linux, networking, Kubernetes, and infrastructure issues in production environments
• Partner directly with customer IT, infrastructure, and security teams to gather requirements and ensure successful deployments
• Build and improve deployment tooling, automation, and operational processes
• Improve reliability, observability, and maintainability across our self-hosted infrastructure
• Develop deployment documentation, runbooks, and troubleshooting guides
• Help shape Nominal's long-term strategy for self-hosted and regulated deployments

We're Looking For

Must Have:

• Strong Linux systems expertise
• Experience operating and troubleshooting production infrastructure
• Background in DevOps, SRE, Platform Engineering, or Infrastructure Engineering
• Ability to independently debug complex systems across multiple layers of the stack
• Comfort working directly with customers and external stakeholders
• Willingness to travel for customer deployments
• Strong ownership mentality and ability to operate in ambiguous environments

Strong Pluses:

• Active security clearance or ability and willingness to obtain and maintain one
• Experience with Kubernetes in production environments
• GitOps workflows and tooling (Flux, Helm, Kustomize, etc.)
• Infrastructure as Code experience
• Datacenter operations experience
• Hardware procurement, provisioning, or lifecycle management
• Networking expertise (routing, switching, troubleshooting, performance tuning)
• Linux kernel, networking, or performance optimization experience
• Security-focused infrastructure experience including TLS and certificate management
• Experience supporting air-gapped, classified, or highly regulated environments

Skills That Supercharge Us

Bare Metal & Provisioning

• PXE
• IPMI
• BMC
• iLO / iDRAC
• MAAS
• Tinkerbell
• Metal provisioning workflows

Systems

• Linux internals
• Kernel troubleshooting
• NUMA
• RDMA
• SR-IOV
• eBPF

Networking

• BGP
• Routing
• Low-latency networking
• NIC offloading
• DPDK

Storage

• Ceph
• NVMe
• Distributed storage systems

Infrastructure

• Kubernetes
• GitOps
• Datacenter automation
• Rack provisioning
• Hardware orchestration
• On-prem infrastructure operations

Benefits/Perks

• 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance
• ️ Unlimited PTO and sick leave
• ️ Free lunch, snacks, and coffee
• Professional Development Stipend
• ️ In-office hardware lab with a $250 project stipend
• ️ Annual company retreat

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin.

ITAR Requirements

To conform to U.S. Government export regulations, applicant must be a (i) U.S. citizen or national, (ii) U.S. lawful, permanent resident (aka green card holder), (iii) Refugee under 8 U.S.C. § 1157, or (iv) Asylee under 8 U.S.C. § 1158, or be eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State. Learn more about the ITAR here.