Baremetal Infrastructure Engineer
About Nominal
Nominal is building the connected test and operations platform powering the world's most advanced hardware systems, from spacecraft and autonomous vehicles to next-generation defense programs. Our platform gives hardware engineering teams a single place to ingest data, analyze performance, automate test execution, and collaborate across every phase of development, so they can move faster without sacrificing safety or precision. We're a fast-moving team that owns problems end-to-end, works across disciplines, and thrives at the intersection of hardware and software.
We serve top-tier commercial and defense customers, from autonomy leaders like Anduril and Shield AI to next-generation aerospace teams like Hermeus and REGENT, and performance engineering teams like Pratt Miller Motorsports, alongside mission partners within the U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force on programs where failure isn’t an option. We’re backed by Sequoia, General Catalyst, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, and Lightspeed. Our team draws from SpaceX, Palantir, Anduril, Applied Intuition, 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 looking for aBaremetal 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.
Compensation
The base pay range for this role is $120,000 - $230,000 per year.