Software Engineer - Backend

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. About the role Nominal's backend runs on a set of Platform teams that own everything below the product surface: ingesting and storing the world's hardware data, making it q [... source excerpt omitted ...] metry and validation platform, systems that ingest multi-modal data (time series, video, point clouds, asset and run catalogs), serve it back at high scale, and hold up under real production load from customers. This role is ideal for engineers who enjoy working close to the metal of distributed systems, reasoning about throughput, latency, data models, and failure, and who want to see their work directly enable real-world hardware. You'll own critical backend systems end to end, from ingestion pipelines to storage engines to performance tuning in production. 🚀 What you'll do: Architect and evolve distributed systems that ingest, process, and persist high-frequency telemetry and [... source excerpt omitted ...] lability, backpressure, fault tolerance, and data consistency in real-time systems. Optimize hot paths, reduce tail latency, and improve reliability as the system scales with new customers and use cases. Collaborate closely with product, infrastructure, and customer-facing engineers to solve domain-specific problems for cutting-edge hardware teams. Influence backend architecture and technical direction, mentor teammates, and raise the bar for system design across the org. 🔍 We're looking for someone with 3+ years building distributed systems where performance, reliability, and operational simplicity matter. Strong experience in Go, Rust, or Java, with an emphasis on correct