About Nominal

Nominal is a venture-backed company with offices in Los Angeles, Austin, and New York City that specializes in software and data management products for organizations that are testing and validating complex physical systems (like drones, planes, rockets, engines, satellites, nuclear reactors, etc.). We are backed by prolific and experienced venture capital firms like General Catalyst, Lux Capital, Founders Fund, XYZ, Haystack, Human Capital, BoxGroup, etc., and have raised significant venture funding with strong early traction in both commercial and defense applications.

The Nominal team comes from commercial companies like SpaceX, Palantir, Anduril, Lockheed Martin, and NASA and is active amongst customers in aerospace, defense, industrial, and advanced energy applications (autonomous aviation, eVTOL/VTOL, flight testing, satellite development, etc.). We are also building and delivering solutions to the United States Air Force (USAF) who are looking to expand use cases across the broader DoD test community.

Our product is a data visualization and computation platform designed to accelerate how engineering teams test and validate hardware systems. We specifically aim to shorten the data review process after running tests and help engineering organizations scale testing campaigns more efficiently and effectively to save time and lower costs. It works by combining heterogeneous data into runs and allowing users to easily build custom visualization and analysis. Users write test logic with interactive computation, and these checks can be applied to historical and future runs to compound learnings. Data sources can include telemetry, sensor data, logs, simulations, and other testing metadata like environment, vehicle, part, version, etc.

As a Product Manager at Nominal, you will be responsible for establishing product vision and unlocking sales growth by listening to hardware engineering users and partnering with internal software engineers to build relevant platforms and tools. This position will report to our Co-founder and work cross-functionally across Software Engineering and Sales & Business Development.

🚀 About the role

• Understand customer workflows. Gain a deep understanding of the workflows and product needs of hardware engineers, and translate these into a product platform and features that uniquely map to the user experience.
• Maintain the roadmap. Identify potential features that will accelerate engineering teams and Nominal’s goals. Balance customer-specific insights with generalizable product innovation.
• Manage tradeoffs. Understand the (potential) tensions between effort vs value, short-term vs long-term growth, and any others that may arise.
• Execute efficiently. Translate product vision into actionable, prioritized capabilities across the product lifecycle, from initial conception to user onboarding, then ongoing improvements.
• Tell the story. Work with sales, business development, and marketing to articulate product capabilities, use cases, and value propositions externally. Create and share product demos.
• Grow the business. Build product culture as part of the early team that dictates - help us scale by sourcing, interviewing, and onboarding new team members.

• 3 years as a software, propulsion, or GNC engineer at a modern aerospace or venture-backed hardware startup.
• 3 years as a Product Manager in software product development, especially in complex industries like financial infrastructure or biotech.
• You have a thorough understanding of web development & distributed systems and can engage deeply with engineers.
• Excitement to be a foundational member of the early team building software tools to amplify the capabilities of remarkable hardware engineering teams.
• Interest in traveling to spend time with end-users on-site (e.g. rocket test stands, spacecraft clean rooms, automated manufacturing facilities).
• Must be eligible to obtain and maintain a U.S. TS Clearance

• Relevant data technologies: Apache Arrow, DataFusion, Flink, Beam, Kafka, D3.js, Superset, DuckDB, Plotly.js, TimescaleDB, QuestDB, Druid, Parquet, InfluxDB
• Modern web technologies: Typescript, Next.js, tRPC, Java, Wasm, WebGL, ZeroMQ, serverless functions, React, Postgres
• Hardware engineering tools: Data Acquisition Systems (DAQs), Digital Data Storage, Nix, RTOS, MCAP, H5, TDMS, LabView, MATLAB/Simulink, WinPlot

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance with 100% of premiums covered
• Unlimited PTO /sick leave
• Free lunch, snacks, and coffee
• Professional development stipend
• Quarterly company retreats

Don’t meet every single requirement? If you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway!