Lead Software Engineer, Backend - Growth & Monetization

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.

About the Role

We're looking for a product-minded engineer to set the technical direction for how customers discover, adopt and realize value from Nominal.

You'll lead the backend side of our new Growth & Monetization team, working at the intersection of product engineering, infrastructure and business strategy. Our scope spans the entire customer journey, from self-serve signup and onboarding to pricing and billing infrastructure, intelligent notifications, product discovery and customer value realization. We're also exploring how AI can transform these experiences, whether that's personalizing onboarding, proactively guiding customers toward deeper platform adoption, helping customers understand the value they're getting from Nominal or automating business value assessments to support renewals and expansion.

You'll own the systems underneath the customer journey: metering, billing, entitlements, provisioning and the infrastructure that makes self-serve expansion possible.

This is a role for someone who decides what's worth building, not just how to build it. You'll identify growth constraints, set the goals the team executes toward and be the technical authority for this domain across Nominal. You'll be hands-on from day one, designing, building and operating the core systems yourself, and your work will directly shape how customers adopt the platform, understand the value they're getting and expand their relationship with Nominal. You'll own the business outcomes as well as the technical decisions. As the team grows around you, there's a path to leading it, but the first job is building the foundation. You'll work closely with product, design and go-to-market leadership and have direct exposure to the business leaders whose outcomes depend on this work.

What you'll do

• Set the technical strategy for monetization infrastructure. Own the roadmap for metering, billing, entitlements, pricing and packaging, and decide what gets built, in what order and why.
• Identify and unlock growth opportunities. Find the technical and product constraints across acquisition, activation, retention and monetization, decide which are worth solving and measure the business impact of solving them.
• Build the core systems yourself. Design, ship and operate the first versions of the infrastructure this team depends on, and set the patterns the engineers who follow will build on.
• Make customer value tangible. Build the systems that measure product adoption, quantify business outcomes and power automated business value assessments and customer-facing insights.
• Build frictionless customer journeys. Own the systems behind self-serve signup, onboarding, account provisioning, payments and activation.
• Drive product discovery and engagement. Build the notification and messaging infrastructure for feature announcements, contextual guidance and personalized nudges toward deeper adoption.
• Build AI-native growth experiences. Develop the agents and intelligent systems that personalize onboarding, surface adoption opportunities and automate customer-facing workflows.
• Set the engineering bar for a new function. Establish the standards, review practices and operating norms the team works to, and help shape who joins it as it grows.

We're looking for someone with

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production backend systems, including setting the technical direction for a domain like billing, metering or entitlements, not just a project within it.
• Strong experience in Go, Rust or Java, with an emphasis on correctness, clarity and long-lived systems.
• You've tech-led a team or formally mentored engineers, set the standard others worked to and been accountable for what the group delivered.
• You've been the person other teams come to for decisions in your domain, and you've owned the tradeoffs across engineering, product and finance.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems and data modeling for systems that have to be correct, like billing and entitlements.
• You identify opportunities from data, run experiments and measure impact on customer adoption and business growth.
• You explain technical decisions clearly to engineers and to business leaders, and you design, build, ship and operate what you own.

Skills that supercharge us

• Experience with billing, metering, payments or usage-based pricing infrastructure.
• Experience with event-driven architectures, notification systems or lifecycle messaging.
• Familiarity with product-led growth, experimentation or self-serve SaaS.
• Experience building AI-powered applications, agents or workflow automation.
• You've managed engineers or helped build a team from scratch, and want to do it again.

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
• 12 weeks parental leave
• Fertility and family planning ($15,000 lifetime)
• Wellness stipend ($100/month)
• $500/year hardware sensor stipend
• 401(k)
• Employee-friendly equity terms
• In-office 5 days per week

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 $255,000 - $300,000 per year.