Baremetal Infrastructure Engineer

Nominals self-hosted and on-prem deployments are becoming increasingly critical to our customers success. As adoption grows, were balancing customer implementations, reliability improvements, FedRAMP readiness, and infrastructure modernization, all while supporting deployments in highly constrained environments.

Were looking for someone who can become our in-house expert on Linux systems, bare metal infrastructure, and deployment reliability. Youll 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.

Youll be a force multiplier for the team, reducing context switching, accelerating customer deployments, and helping us build a world-class self-hosted platform.

What Youll 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 Nominals long-term strategy for self-hosted and regulated deployments

• 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, Aerospace and Defense, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Automation, BGP, Computer Engineering, Customer Relations, Customer Support/Service, Data Analysis, Debugging Skills, DevOps, Digital Certificates, Distributed Computing, Documentation, Environmental Issues, Government Regulations, Home Automation, IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface), Identify Issues, Information Technology & Information Systems, Kernel Programming, Linux Kernel, Linux Operating System, Machine Tool, National Intelligence Council (NIC), Network Administration/Management, Network Debugging, Network Operations Center, Network Performance/Analysis, Network Routing, Network Switching, On Site Support, Operations Processes, Performance Analysis, Performance Engineering, Performance Testing, Performance Tuning/Optimization, Process Improvement, Production Systems, Purchasing/Procurement, Reliability Engineering, Requirements Management, SSL-TLS (Secure Socket Layer - Transport Layer Security), Security Clearance, Security Infrastructure, Team Building, Test Automation, Testing, United States Air Force (USAF), United States Citizen, United States Navy (USN), Willing to Travel

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.

Title: Baremetal Infrastructure Engineer Organization: Nominal Inc Location: Los Angeles Description:

About Nominal

Nominal is building the connected test and operations platform powering the worlds 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. Were 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.

Were looking for a Baremetal Infrastructure Engineer to join our team building high-scale, mission-critical infrastructure for advanced hardware systems. Youll be on the front lines deploying Nominals 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.