{"id":3955722,"url":"https://alion.io/job/nominal-staff-software-engineer-agents-uk","title":"Staff Software Engineer, Agents - UK","company":{"id":63575,"name":"Nominal","domain":"nominal.io","url":"https://alion.io/company/nominal","size_band":"501-1000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Gem","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":86,"open_postings":23,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.565,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":57,"computed_at":"2026-11-09T06:03:00Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"explicit","locations":["London, United Kingdom"],"countries":["GB"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":180000,"max":220000,"currency":"GBP","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":293851},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Claude Code","optional":false},{"name":"Cursor","optional":false},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Model Context Protocol","optional":false},{"name":"OpenAI Codex","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-11-09T03:28:51Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-11-09","last_verified_at":"2026-11-09T07:58:04Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":0,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":0},"description":"About Nominal\nEngineers today are building some of the most ambitious machines humanity has ever seen. They should have AI that’s purpose-built for them.\nNominal 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.\nOur 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.\nSome 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.\nAbout Hardware Intelligence\nWe'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. We believe opinionated AI, built for the real work of hardware programs, will change how the world engineers.\nWe're collaborative, iterative, and high-agency, and we're human-centered and customer-focused. We build with the newest AI tools every day, and because those tools keep changing, so do we: we stay curious and keep looking for the better way. Our team spans data science and ML, distributed systems, search, and knowledge systems, and we obsess over how agents can be genuinely useful to the engineers who rely on them.\nThe role\nAs 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.\nWhat you'll do\nDesign and build the agent harness: orchestration, planning, tool calling, memory, and background agents that run long investigations on their own.\nOwn the shared tool layer that our agents and external agents (via MCP) both use, so every capability we build works everywhere.\nBuild how agents assemble context: retrieval across test data, documents, designs, and simulations, including sensor data far too large to fit in a context window.\nMake model choice a decision, not a dependency: routing, cost, latency, and fallbacks across frontier models.\nPartner with evals to make quality measurable, and with the platform team on how the context layer grows.\nSet the architecture other engineers build on, and raise the bar through design reviews and mentorship.\nWhat you'll bring\n8+ years building production systems, including real experience shipping LLM or agent systems to users.\nStrong distributed-systems and backend fundamentals; you've owned systems where reliability mattered.\nOpinions about agent architecture (tool design, context management, autonomy, failure handling) and the judgment to change them when data says so.\nA track record of setting technical direction across a team and raising the bar for the engineers around you.\nYou build with modern AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex) every day, and stay curious and open to better ways of working. The tools keep changing, and so do we.\nNice to have\nYou've built an agent harness or LLM platform that other engineers or customers build on, at an AI-native company.\nYou've shipped long-running, autonomous agents to production and know where they break.\nYou've contributed to MCP, agent frameworks, or open-source LLM infrastructure.\nYou've built software for physical systems: robots, vehicles, aircraft, or the test stands behind them.\nBenefits/Perks\n Unlimited PTO and sick leave\n Free lunch, snacks, and coffee\n Professional Development Stipend\n Annual company retreat\n Hardware sensor stipend\n Employee-friendly equity terms\n In-office 5 days per week\nAll qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin.\nCompensation\nThe base pay range for this role is £180,000 - £220,000 per year.","description_format":"text","description_chars":5174,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":8,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity","Professional development","Unlimited PTO"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United Kingdom","iso":"GB","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Manufacturing & Industrial Software"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-11-09T07:58:04Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":86,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.86,"p_room":1,"age_days":0,"expected_fill_days":91,"reasons":["conf:0","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-11-09T08:44:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":293851,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/nominal-staff-software-engineer-agents-uk","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/nominal-staff-software-engineer-agents-uk.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-09T08:44:00Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":7421,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-10T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":63575},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=63575"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fnominal-staff-software-engineer-agents-uk"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":2,"usd":0.2},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fnominal-staff-software-engineer-agents-uk"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fnominal-staff-software-engineer-agents-uk"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/nominal-staff-software-engineer-agents-uk\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fnominal-staff-software-engineer-agents-uk"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":3955722}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"nominal.io","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":3955722},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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