Baremetal Infrastructure Engineer

About NominalNominal 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 owning deployment of Nominal's software to our most demanding customers, including USG customers operating in restricted environments, writing runbooks, speccing hardware, building deployment collateral, and collaborating with IT teams to satisfy a wide variety of technical requirements. ð About the roleNominal'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.ðð»‍ð» What You'll DoServe as a technical expert for customer-hosted and air-gapped deploymentsTravel onsite to support critical customer implementations when additional technical expertise is requiredTroubleshoot Linux, networking, Kubernetes, and infrastructure issues in production environmentsPartner directly with customer IT, infrastructure, and security teams to gather requirements and ensure successful deploymentsBuild and improve deployment tooling, automation, and operational processesImprove reliability, observability, and maintainability across our self-hosted infrastructureDevelop deployment documentation, runbooks, and troubleshooting guidesHelp shape Nominal's long-term strategy for self-hosted and regulated deploymentsð We're Looking ForMust Have:Strong Linux systems expertiseExperience operating and troubleshooting production infrastructureBackground in DevOps, SRE, Platform Engineering, or Infrastructure EngineeringAbility to independently debug complex systems across multiple layers of the stackComfort working directly with customers and external stakeholdersWillingness to travel for customer deploymentsStrong ownership mentality and ability to operate in ambiguous environmentsStrong Pluses:Active security clearance or ability and willingness to obtain and maintain oneExperience with Kubernetes in production environmentsGitOps workflows and tooling (Flux, Helm, Kustomize, etc.)Infrastructure as Code experienceDatacenter operations experienceHardware procurement, provisioning, or lifecycle managementNetworking expertise (routing, switching, troubleshooting, performance tuning)Linux kernel, networking, or performance optimization experienceSecurity-focused infrastructure experience including TLS and certificate managementExperience supporting air-gapped, classified, or highly regulated environments Skills That Supercharge UsBare Metal & ProvisioningPXEIPMIBMCiLO / iDRACMAASTinkerbellMetal provisioning workflowsSystemsLinux internalsKernel troubleshootingNUMARDMASR-IOVeBPFNetworkingBGPRoutingLow-latency networkingNIC offloadingDPDKStorageCephNVMeDistributed storage systemsInfrastructureKubernetesGitOpsDatacenter automationRack provisioningHardware orchestrationOn-prem infrastructure operations Benefits/Perksð 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insuranceð️ Unlimited PTO and sick leaveð½️ Free lunch, snacks, and coffeeð Professional Development Stipendð ️ In-office hardware lab with a $250 project stipend️ Annual company retreatAll qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin. ITAR RequirementsTo 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.