Forward Deployed Engineer, AI
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Summary
An AI Forward Deployed Engineer embeds on site with hardware engineering teams at partner programs, building custom agentic workflows and skills on Nominal's platform that do real engineering work (checks, analyses, issue investigations), then bringing reusable patterns back as product. Core stack: Python, data skills, and agentic AI workflows built with modern AI coding tools.
About Nominal
Our mission is to accelerate how the world engineers new hardware. Nominal's connected test and operations platform powers the world's most advanced hardware programs and its most ambitious startups, from spacecraft, racecars, and autonomous vehicles to next-generation defense and energy programs. Our customers include Anduril, Shield AI, Hermeus, Albedo, Shinkei, and Pratt Miller Motorsports, as well as U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force programs. Now we're expanding across the entire hardware lifecycle, building the foundation, AI-native applications, and agents that accelerate innovators' work and change what's possible to build.
We're backed by Sequoia, General Catalyst, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, and Lightspeed, and our team comes from SpaceX, Apple, Palantir, Anduril, Applied Intuition, and other leading companies.
About Hardware Intelligence
We'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.
We'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.
The Role:
As an AI Forward Deployed Engineer, you'll embed with hardware teams, build agentic workflows and skills on Nominal, and bring back the patterns that should become product.
💼 What You'll Do:
- Embed with hardware engineering teams at build-partner programs, on site and alongside them.
- Build custom agentic workflows and skills for each partner's programs that do real engineering work: turning requirements and test plans into checks, running analyses, and investigating issues.
- Spot the patterns across customers and bring them back as product: new skills, agent capabilities, and eval tasks.
- Win build partners by proving value: measured before-and-after results on real programs.
- Be the technical voice of the customer inside the Hardware Intelligence team.
🚀 What you'll bring:
- 4+ years as a software engineer, with strong Python and data skills.
- Hands-on experience building agentic workflows: tool use, prompting, skills, and checking whether they actually work.
- Comfort in front of customers: you can run a working session with senior engineers and earn their trust.
- A builder's instinct for what's reusable and what's one-off.
- Willingness to travel to customer sites.
- You 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.
⚡️ Nice to have:
- You've been a test, flight test, controls, or hardware engineer before moving into software.
- You've been a forward-deployed or solutions engineer at an AI or data company.
- You've turned a one-off customer build into a reusable product feature.
- You hold an active security clearance, or can obtain one.
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 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.