The DevOps Engineer will enhance engineering velocity by building cloud infrastructure systems, optimizing CI/CD pipelines, and managing deployments to improve developer experience.
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 top-tier commercial and defense customers, including the U.S. Navy, United States Air Force, Shield AI, and Anduril. 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.
As a Cloud Infrastructure Engineer, you’ll optimize CI/CD pipelines, streamline developer workflows, and ensure consistent, reliable environments across cloud and on-prem systems. Your work directly accelerates product development, improves deployment reliability, and empowers engineers to move fast without sacrificing safety or precision. Key skills include AWS, Kubernetes, Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, observability tools, and scripting in Bash, Python, or Go.
🚀 About the role
- Empower engineering velocity: Ensure our growing engineering team can move quickly and safely by building and improving our DevOps and cloud infrastructure systems. You’ll focus on cloud infrastructure while having the flexibility to contribute to on-prem deployment systems or traditional software engineering.
- Optimize and scale: Own the systems for deploying and managing cloud infrastructure, refining our CI/CD pipelines, and improving developer experience. Your work will directly enhance developer environment consistency, accelerate build times, and simplify service bootstrapping.
- Manage tradeoffs: Understand the tensions between effort vs value, short-term vs long-term growth, and any others that may arise.
- Solve & streamline: See an issue? You’re on it, with the autonomy to fix problems fast and keep our technology ahead of the curve.
🔎 We’re looking for someone with
- Proven engineering expertise: You’ve been in the trenches of software engineering (minimum of 4+ YOE), with firsthand experience developing, deploying, and monitoring infrastructure for high-scale distributed systems or complex tools.
- 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.
- 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’ve got a solid track record in turning technical concepts into reality and managing the full cycle from planning to deployment.
- Ability to travel 1-2 times a month to be on-site with our customers
⚡ Skills that supercharge us
- AWS cloud infrastructure (required), Azure (nice-to-have).
- Kubernetes: Deploying, scaling, and troubleshooting applications.
- CI/CD: Designing and building pipelines with GitHub Actions or similar.
- Infrastructure as Code: Crossplane, Terraform, or similar.
- Observability: Datadog, Prometheus (metrics collection, dashboarding, alerting).
- Scripting and development: Bash, Python, and/or Go
✨ 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.
Top Skills
AWS
Azure
Bash
Crossplane
Datadog
Github Actions
Go
Kubernetes
Prometheus
Python
Terraform
Nominal Los Angeles, California, USA Office
Los Angeles, CA, United States
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