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# Staff Software Engineer, Agents

- **Company:** Nominal Inc
- **Location:** Austin, TX, United States
- **Experience:** Expert
- **Contract:** Permanent contract
- **Skills:** Artificial Intelligence, Cursor, Open Source Technology, Software Engineering, Test Data, Large Language Models, Claude Code, Backend, Build Management
- **Published:** October 30, 2026
- **Apply:** https://www.careerbuilder.com/job-details/staff-software-engineer-agents-austin-tx--5fd63192-3c32-4431-8355-6ce5f7d7bebf

## About the Role

Software Engineering, Software Agents, Testing, Startup, United States Air Force (USAF), United States Navy (USN), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Apple, Telemetry, Campaigns

## Description

As a Staff Engineer supporting agents, youll design how Nominals agents work: youll architect the one platform our agents, the Nominal MCP, and our internal agent all run on, and set technical direction for the team that builds on it.

What Youll Do:

 * Design and build the agent harness: orchestration, planning, tool calling, memory, and background agents that run long investigations on their own.
 * Own the shared tool layer that our agents and external agents (via MCP) both use, so every capability we build works everywhere.
 * Build how agents assemble context: retrieval across test data, documents, designs, and simulations, including sensor data far too large to fit in a context window.
 * Make model choice a decision, not a dependency: routing, cost, latency, and fallbacks across frontier models.
 * Partner with evals to make quality measurable, and with the platform team on how the context layer grows.
 * Set the architecture other engineers build on, and raise the bar through design reviews and mentorship.

What youll bring:

 * 8+ years building production systems, including real experience shipping LLM or agent systems to users.
 * Strong distributed-systems and backend fundamentals; youve owned systems where reliability mattered.
 * Opinions about agent architecture (tool design, context management, autonomy, failure handling) and the judgment to change them when data says so.
 * A track record of setting technical direction across a team and raising the bar for the engineers around you.
 * You build with modern AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex) every day, and stay curious and open to better ways of working. The tools keep changing, and so do we.

️ Nice to have:

 * Youve built an agent harness or LLM platform that other engineers or customers build on, at an AI-native company.
 * Youve shipped long-running, autonomous agents to production and know where they break.
 * Youve contributed to MCP, agent frameworks, or open-source LLM infrastructure.
 * Youve built software for physical systems: robots, vehicles, aircraft, or the test stands behind them.