Mission Operations Engineer

About Nominal
Nominal is building the software infrastructure powering the world's most advanced hardware systems — from spacecraft and autonomous vehicles to next-generation industrial machines. Our platform ingests high-rate telemetry, validates complex autonomy software in real time, and enables engineers to iterate faster without sacrificing safety or precision. We're a small, fast-moving team of engineers and operators who own problems end-to-end, work across disciplines, and thrive on challenges at the intersection of hardware and software.

As a dual-use platform, we serve leading commercial and defence customers — including organisations such as Anduril, Shield AI, and the United States Air Force,— as well as, increasingly, both commercial and defence customers in the UK and Europe. We're backed by Sequoia, General Catalyst, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, and Lightspeed Ventures.

Our team draws experience from SpaceX, Palantir, Anduril, Applied Intuition, and other leading companies — united by a common mission: enabling hardware engineers to push the boundaries of advanced technology with speed, safety, and precision.

In this pivotal role, you'll bridge Nominal's software with real-world applications, becoming an indispensable advisor to our customers. You'll ensure our solutions not only meet but exceed operational requirements, tailoring deployments to unique environments, providing comprehensive training, and directly addressing any challenges that arise. Your work will transform customer operations, enhance user experiences, and drive Nominal's technology to new frontiers.

About The Role

• Deploy & Integrate: Take Nominal's tech to operation on the ground, tailoring solutions to fit our clients' high-stakes environments perfectly.
• Build Relationships & Business: You're not just deploying technology; you're growing Nominal's presence and impact and establishing deep, productive partnerships. You're acting as an account manager and product expert, and important relational and technical capital is on your shoulders.
• Train & Support: You're on the front lines, making sure our users understand our products and can use them to their full potential.
• Enhance & Evolve: Your feedback loops are gold, turning user experiences into actionable insights for continuous product improvement.
• Solve & Streamline: See an issue? You're on it, with the autonomy to fix problems fast and keep our technology ahead of the curve.
• Be the Bridge: You're the vital link between Nominal and our customers, translating needs into solutions and ensuring seamless collaboration across all fronts.

We're looking for someone with

• Proven Engineering Expertise: 4+ years of professional experience and have worked in the trenches of hardware engineering and/or data engineering. You have firsthand experience in environments like propulsion test stands, satellite mission operations, and flight testing, or you'll have spent time constructing a data model users can empathize with, and helping them turn that data into decisions. Your resume says, "I've built and tested the future."
• Technical Sharpshooter: Your intellectual curiosity drives you to solve complex problems. You think in systems and see the big picture, yet you're all about nailing the details. You have a strong intuition for the math and physics our customers encounter daily.
• Communicator & Influencer: You articulate complex ideas with ease and confidence, steering conversations and projects with clarity and honesty.
• Dynamic Leader & Team Player: With a mix of humility, eagerness to learn, and empathy, you're a natural at leading and lifting those around you. You don't just spot problems; you solve them.
• Project Maestro: You have a solid track record of turning technical concepts into reality and managing the full cycle from planning to deployment.
• Ready to Roll: Up to 50% travel? No problem. You're ready to be where the action is, anywhere, anytime.
• [Bonus] Security clearance: Active or eligible to obtain UK SC/DV clearance (or equivalent).

Skills That Supercharge Us

• Customer-facing skills: Experienced operator, customer success leader, and/or technical program manager
• Data Engineering Proficiency: Expertise in SQL, Python, Pandas, Matlab, or R. Bonus if familiarity with Influx, Grafana, Spark, Polars, Arrow, Kafka, Beam, and Flink.
• [Bonus] In-Field Hardware Mastery: Proficiency with hardware engineering tools such as DAQs, DDS, Nix, RTOS, MCAP, H5, TDMS, LabVIEW, Simulink, and WinPlot.

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin.
We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.