Mission Dev (Forward Deployed Software Engineering) Engineer – Forward-deployed Software Engineering

Job Description

Mission Dev Engineer – New Grad (Summer 2027) | Nominal

The Tone:
This is a New Grad role at Nominal, likely located in New York, NY, for students on track to graduate by Summer 2027. Nominal builds a connected test and operations platform that powers advanced hardware systems, including spacecraft, autonomous vehicles, and defense programs. This role is critical for understanding customer workflows and directly building software solutions that enable hardware engineering teams to move faster and more safely. As a forward-deployed software engineer, you will bridge the gap between customer needs and product development, ensuring Nominal’s platform solves real-world challenges for high-stakes applications.

The TL;DR
• Role: Early Career
• Type: Full-time
• Location: In-person New York, NY

• Mission: Solve customer testing and analysis problems by building and deploying software that helps them accelerate their hardware development.

What You’ll Actually Do
• Engage with Customers: Work directly with customer engineers to understand their hardware testing and analysis workflows and pinpoint problems that can be solved with software.
• Develop Software Solutions: Design and build integrations, data pipelines, and applications to connect Nominal’s platform to customer systems and manage high-frequency, high-volume hardware data.
• Own Projects End-to-End: Take responsibility for projects from the initial problem understanding phase through building, deploying, and supporting the final software solution, with guidance from mentors.
• Iterate Based on Feedback: Put working software into users’ hands early, observe how they use it, and quickly refine solutions based on their practical feedback.
• Inform Product Strategy: Bring insights and learnings from individual customer engagements back to the core product and engineering teams to develop capabilities that benefit a broader customer base.

The Must-Haves
• Background: Bachelor’s degree (or equivalent academic progress) in engineering, with an expected graduation in Summer 2027 or earlier. This is an Entry-Level role.
• Experience: Demonstrated hands-on experience building software, whether gained through internships, personal projects, or academic coursework.
• Skills: Strong core engineering fundamentals; ability to work through open-ended problems; aptitude for learning unfamiliar systems; capacity to ensure solutions are effectively deployed and used; ambition, resourcefulness, and perseverance in problem-solving.
• Bonus: A personal passion for tackling challenging problems and contributing to the future of critical infrastructure.