Nominal

Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

Austin, Texas, United States

Not SpecifiedCompensation
Senior (5 to 8 years)Experience Level
Full TimeJob Type
UnknownVisa
Aerospace, Defense, Software Development, Data SolutionsIndustries

Senior Engineer - Distributed Systems

Employment Type: Full-time Salary: $150,000 - $180,000 a year

About Nominal

Nominal is a venture-backed company with offices in Los Angeles, Austin, and New York City. We build software and data solutions for organizations, testing and validating complex systems—think drones, robots, rocket engines, and satellites. Backed by top investors like General Catalyst, Founders Fund, and Lux Capital, we’re gaining momentum across the commercial and government aerospace and defense ecosystem, including direct work with the Department of Defense.

Our team includes alumni from SpaceX, Meta, Palantir, Anduril, Lockheed Martin, and NASA, united by a mission: accelerate hardware innovation by making testing faster, smarter, and easier. Our platform helps engineering teams scale their test infrastructure and gain insight from high-throughput, high-complexity test data.

We're looking for a senior engineer to take on a high-leverage role focused on strengthening the foundations of our distributed systems and improving how the entire team builds, ships, and maintains software. This role is ideal for someone who thrives in complex environments, has deep experience with incident response and production systems, and is driven to create safer, faster systems through smart infrastructure and process design.

🚀 What You’ll Do

  • Drive reliability and observability improvements across large-scale distributed systems.
  • Serve as a force multiplier across all engineering teams by reducing downtime, improving tooling, and freeing up senior engineers from firefighting.
  • Own and evolve our incident review process, leading postmortems and embedding learnings into tools, practices, and culture across the company.
  • Collaborate with teams to improve release hygiene, including:
    • Automating release gating (e.g., ensuring code bakes in staging for appropriate windows).
    • Preventing code from stagnating in staging environments.
    • Implementing pre-prod automated test pipelines to catch issues early.
  • Build and maintain Nominal’s gRPC middleware to ensure safe, observable, and performant service communication.
  • Improve alerting, debugging, and monitoring to ensure production health and rapid root cause analysis.

🔍 Who You Are

  • You have 7+ years of experience in software engineering with a strong focus on production systems and distributed architectures.
  • You thrive in high-leverage roles that improve how everyone else builds, ships, and fixes software.
  • You’ve led or played a significant role in incident response, building systems, and culture around continuous improvement.
  • You’re excited by complexity, not afraid of it, and you’re deeply motivated to make systems safer and teams faster.

⚡ Skills that supercharge us

  • Experience working on distributed systems at scale.
  • Hands-on experience with Kafka/Redpanda, PostgreSQL or other SQL databases, MongoDB/NoSQL databases, Clickhouse or other OLAP databases.
  • Deep understanding of release automation, CI/CD, and code lifecycle management.
  • Familiarity with gRPC and experience building shared infrastructure components like middleware.
  • A systems mindset—you understand the ripple effects of a single bug and know how to design to prevent them.

✨ Benefits & Perks

  • 🏥 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance.
  • 🏖️ Unlimited PTO and sick leave.
  • 🍽️ Free lunch, snacks, and coffee.
  • 🚀 Professional Development Stipend.
  • ✈️ Annual company retreats.

Compensation

Compensation at Nominal for eligible roles consists of a base salary, equity, and benefits. The base salary is just one part of the overall compensation package, which may also include equity in the form of stock options. In addition, we offer comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance, life coverage, a 401(k) retirement plan, learning stipend, and unlimited PTO. Please note that benefits may vary based on your location and are subject to change.

Equal Opportunity

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

Skills

Distributed Systems
Incident Response
Monitoring & Observability
Automation
Release Management
Infrastructure Design
Postmortem Analysis
Testing Pipelines

Nominal

Software tools for engineering hardware systems

About Nominal

Nominal.io provides software tools designed specifically for engineering teams working with complex hardware systems. Their platform allows these teams to test and deploy hardware systems significantly faster than traditional methods, making it particularly beneficial for industries such as aerospace, defense, energy, and telecommunications, where hardware performance is critical. The platform consolidates data from various sources, enabling engineers to monitor and analyze their systems effectively in a secure environment. Unlike many competitors, Nominal.io focuses on a niche market with high demands for reliability, offering a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model that ensures clients have continuous access to the latest features. The company's goal is to enhance the resilience and performance of hardware systems, positioning itself as a key partner for engineering teams looking to improve their deployment processes.

Austin, TexasHeadquarters
2022Year Founded
$26.7MTotal Funding
SERIES_ACompany Stage
Industrial & Manufacturing, Enterprise Software, Aerospace, DefenseIndustries
51-200Employees

Benefits

Health Insurance
Dental Insurance
Vision Insurance
Unlimited Paid Time Off
Professional Development Budget
Quarterly company retreats

Risks

AWS's space accelerator program increases competition in the aerospace sector.
Reliance on government partnerships exposes Nominal to policy and budget changes.
Rapid tech advancements could render Nominal's offerings obsolete without innovation.

Differentiation

Nominal offers a secure platform for mission-critical hardware data management.
The company accelerates hardware testing and deployment up to ten times faster.
Nominal's SaaS model ensures continuous access to the latest features and updates.

Upsides

Recent $27.5M funding strengthens Nominal's financial foundation and market reach.
Partnerships with the U.S. government enhance opportunities in aerospace and defense.
Leadership experience from SpaceX, Palantir, and NASA boosts industry credibility.

Land your dream remote job 3x faster with AI