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Baremetal Infrastructure Engineer
Nominal
- Location
- Onsite (New York, NY · Los Angeles, CA · Austin, TX · Seattle, WA)
- Employment
- Full-time
- Level
- Senior Level
Posted 5 days ago
About the Role
Nominal is building a connected test and operations platform for advanced hardware systems, serving top-tier commercial and defense customers. This role focuses on deploying and operating the company's software on bare metal and air-gapped infrastructure for demanding clients, requiring expertise in Linux systems and production environments.
Skills
Linux Systems
Kubernetes
Bare Metal Infrastructure
DevOps
SRE
Networking
GitOps
Infrastructure as Code
Datacenter Operations
Hardware Provisioning
PXE
IPMI
BGP
Ceph
TLS Management
Air-gapped Deployments
Benefits
- Medical Insurance
- Dental Insurance
- Vision Insurance
- Unlimited PTO
- Sick Leave
Perks
- Free lunch
- Free snacks
- Free coffee
- Professional Development Stipend
- In-office hardware lab
- Annual company retreat
Full job details
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.
We're looking for a Baremetal Infrastructure Engineer to join our team building high-scale, mission-critical infrastructure for advanced hardware systems. You'll be on the front lines deploying Nominal's software to our most demanding customers, including USG customers operating in restricted environments, owning runbooks, building deployment collateral, and working shoulder-to-shoulder with customer hardware engineers and the IT teams they need to satisfy.
🚀 About the role
Nominal's self-hosted and on-prem deployments are becoming increasingly critical to our customers' success. As adoption grows, we're balancing customer implementations, reliability improvements, FedRAMP readiness, and infrastructure modernization, all while supporting deployments in highly constrained environments.
We're looking for someone who can become our in-house expert on Linux systems, bare metal infrastructure, and deployment reliability. You'll help customers deploy and operate Nominal in their own environments while also driving the internal improvements that make those deployments more repeatable, observable, and scalable.
This role sits at the intersection of DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, and customer-facing infrastructure. One day you might be debugging networking issues on a customer rack. The next, you might be building provisioning automation, improving Kubernetes upgrade paths, or implementing observability features that eliminate future support burdens.
You'll be a force multiplier for the team, reducing context switching, accelerating customer deployments, and helping us build a world-class self-hosted platform.
👨🏻💻 What You'll Do
- Serve as a technical expert for customer-hosted and air-gapped deployments
- Travel onsite to support critical customer implementations when additional technical expertise is required
- Troubleshoot Linux, networking, Kubernetes, and infrastructure issues in production environments
- Partner directly with customer IT, infrastructure, and security teams to gather requirements and ensure successful deployments
- Build and improve deployment tooling, automation, and operational processes
- Improve reliability, observability, and maintainability across our self-hosted infrastructure
- Develop deployment documentation, runbooks, and troubleshooting guides
- Help shape Nominal's long-term strategy for self-hosted and regulated deployments
🔍 We're Looking For
Must Have:
- Strong Linux systems expertise
- Experience operating and troubleshooting production infrastructure
- Background in DevOps, SRE, Platform Engineering, or Infrastructure Engineering
- Ability to independently debug complex systems across multiple layers of the stack
- Comfort working directly with customers and external stakeholders
- Willingness to travel for customer deployments
- Strong ownership mentality and ability to operate in ambiguous environments
Strong Pluses:
- Active security clearance or ability and willingness to obtain and maintain one
- Experience with Kubernetes in production environments
- GitOps workflows and tooling (Flux, Helm, Kustomize, etc.)
- Infrastructure as Code experience
- Datacenter operations experience
- Hardware procurement, provisioning, or lifecycle management
- Networking expertise (routing, switching, troubleshooting, performance tuning)
- Linux kernel, networking, or performance optimization experience
- Security-focused infrastructure experience including TLS and certificate management
- Experience supporting air-gapped, classified, or highly regulated environments
⚡ Skills That Supercharge Us
Bare Metal & Provisioning
- PXE
- IPMI
- BMC
- iLO / iDRAC
- MAAS
- Tinkerbell
- Metal provisioning workflows
Systems
- Linux internals
- Kernel troubleshooting
- NUMA
- RDMA
- SR-IOV
- eBPF
Networking
- BGP
- Routing
- Low-latency networking
- NIC offloading
- DPDK
Storage
- Ceph
- NVMe
- Distributed storage systems
Infrastructure
- Kubernetes
- GitOps
- Datacenter automation
- Rack provisioning
- Hardware orchestration
- On-prem infrastructure operations
✨ Benefits/Perks
- 🏥 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance
- 🏖️ Unlimited PTO and sick leave
- 🍽️ Free lunch, snacks, and coffee
- 🚀 Professional Development Stipend
- 🛠️ In-office hardware lab with a $250 project 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.