During college, I spent my summers doing cybersecurity research for the Department of Defense. I loved the mission and impact of government work, and have always been driven by knowing that my work matters. So when I was choosing between government and industry, I knew I needed to find that same sense of impact. What ultimately drew me to Nominal was the very clear impact of the work that I’d be doing here, and the speed that we’d move at.

My proudest accomplishment so far has been a project aggregating key metrics for hardware fleets. I saw the project through the end-to-end product lifecycle, from initial scoping and design, to collaborating with other engineers on the implementation, and working directly with users to incorporate their feedback.

The best part has been seeing the customers who are using this feature in their daily workflows. TPS, the Test Pilot School, stood out in particular. When I first interviewed at Nominal, I saw a flight test demo which highlighted the product’s value proposition to me. Being able to contribute to one of Nominal’s earliest customers in the flight test domain felt like coming full circle.

Nominal is growing fast, and there’s so much room to take on new challenges and shape what comes next. The company offsite this past December was the first time I’d seen everyone together in one room. It hit me just how fast we’re moving and how much there is to build. The speed that we move pushes me to learn new things every day.

After college, I wanted to find an environment where I could keep learning at the same pace as school. I’d heard from so many CS graduates that they never felt as intellectually challenged in their careers as they did in college. That hasn’t been true for me at Nominal. I’m constantly being pushed into new territory and that’s exactly where I want to be.

Interested in learning more about Nominal? Visit our Careers page.

At Purdue, I was part of the Purdue Space Program, where I helped build a liquid-fueled rocket. It gave me firsthand exposure to the full design, build, test lifecycle of a hardware engineer. While there were strong tools for designing and building hardware, I realized there was a major gap when it came to testing. Software engineers have countless tools to support every stage of development. Hardware engineers, especially during testing, largely do not.

That gap followed me through my internships and first role out of college. Whether I was developing hardware at Tesla, building systems at SpaceX, or reviewing test and launch data for the U.S. Space Force, testing kept showing up as the critical bottleneck. It became clear how essential high-quality testing is and how valuable it would be to make it faster and more reliable.

When I discovered what Nominal was building, it immediately clicked. It was the exact platform I wished I’d had in each of those roles. Joining the Mission Operations team was a chance to work on a product that directly addresses a problem I’d personally experienced across multiple industries.

One of the most rewarding parts of the job is working directly with users. Recently, I paired with an aerospace customer to understand how their system was behaving in Nominal. Just a few days later, they flew their aircraft for the first time. Knowing I played a small role in helping someone get a vehicle off the ground was incredibly motivating.

I’ve always wanted to be surrounded by people I can learn from, and that’s been true from day one at Nominal. Every conversation, whether with customers or our engineers, pushes my understanding forward. As we continue to grow and bring in people with diverse, deep experience, the opportunity to learn only gets better.

Interested in learning more about Nominal? Visit our Careers page.

When I started exploring roles as a software engineer, I knew that I wanted to work at the intersection of multiple disciplines. This is what initially drew me to Nominal. I figured that you have to be really smart to be a software engineer. You have to be really, really smart to be a hardware engineer. I valued the opportunity to get exposure to both groups, and my theory has held true; I’ve met some of the smartest, most wise and intelligent engineers, both at Nominal and at our customers.

Coming into university, my game plan was to intern at big tech, intern at a startup, do research, and then figure out which path I wanted to pursue post-graduation. I found that working at a smaller company allowed me to think strategically and gave me the biggest delta in growth.

At Nominal, I’ve gotten to take on ambitious projects with real stakes, ones that have an impact on our bottom line. I have more skin in the game, more responsibility, and more riding on my decisions. I’ve also gotten to solve problems myself, compared to previous roles where managers told me the answer, which felt like copying the solution manual rather than learning the hard skills.

Early in my time at Nominal, I gave a demo of an LLM integration to help users analyze data, and three weeks later there was a dedicated team working on that project. It’s incredibly validating getting this work in front of customers and seeing how impressed they’ve been. We’ve learned a lot in a short span of time. Nominal moves fast, which means that every month or two I have something new to be proud of, and my proudest accomplishment just keeps growing in stakes as time goes on.

My coolest experience so far was giving a tech talk at a university recruiting event. I’d only been here a few months, and I was already representing the company to a bunch of external people. It felt like a vote of confidence and it reaffirmed my decision to join a small company at this stage of my career. I was thrown into the deep end and was super nervous, but I got through it and it showed me that I could excel in this environment.

Nominal isn’t a risky startup in the pre-product-market-fit sense. It’s a small company, yes, but it’s growing and stable. You get the best of both worlds here: agency, ownership, and ambitious projects with support from senior engineers when you need it. You’re not completely underwater and there are people who can mentor you, ranging from just a couple years ahead of you to people with decades of experience. There are no real downsides. If you want mentorship and a clear path toward your goals, you can get that here. If you want ownership, agency, and skin in the game, you can get that here as well.

Interested in learning more about Nominal? Visit our Careers page.

After a few years in consulting, I was ready to get experience building. My friend Wes, a Bain colleague, joined Nominal last year and kept telling me I’d love it. The more I learned about Nominal, the more it made sense: I’d own my work, see how the whole company operates, and learn from an exceptionally talented team. When a six-month externship opportunity opened, Nominal was the clear answer.

I joined Nominal’s Business Operations team to partner with internal teams on their most pressing problems. Lately, I’ve worked with Growth and Revenue Operations to prepare our sales motion for its next phase. I’ve also contributed to our marketing rebrand, AI-powered prospecting, Federal growth strategy, and Nominal’s expansion into energy. I’ve touched nearly every part of the company, and while some of it was outside my comfort zone, it’s exactly the kind of experience that stretches you to learn quickly.

A favorite moment was at a conference with the Society of Flight Test Engineers in Savannah. While at our booth beside Hermeus, an early customer, an engineer invited us to watch their live test feed being streamed in the Nominal platform. I saw their engine test in real time as they pointed out data spikes and mentioned how much of an improvement Nominal was to their testing experience. Moments like that make the work feel real.

My biggest surprise at Nominal has been the ownership. Each morning, I ask myself, “What will move the needle today?” This autonomy can feel daunting, but the team supports you. People care about your development, and mentorship has accelerated my growth. Fast feedback loops mean you’re not guessing, and when you get it right, you see a direct line between your work and the outcome.

I’m excited to keep building. For anyone considering a startup: if you want to learn fast and make a real impact, I’d point you to Nominal. You build your own roadmap around the problems you find most critical. You “staff yourself” to the project where you can make the most impact. The ambiguity can feel uncomfortable, but that discomfort is where growth is, and I can’t imagine a better place to do it.

Interested in learning more about Nominal? Visit our Careers page.

I first heard about Nominal from a friend at school who had interned under one of Nominal’s team members at a previous company. When I went through the interview process, what immediately stood out to me was the caliber of the team and the companies that we work with. Our customers are doing genuinely cool, cutting-edge work, and getting to partner with them is incredibly motivating.

During my first two weeks at Nominal, I was thrown straight into the deep end scaling our real-time streaming capabilities for a critical customer test. I worked alongside one of the most experienced engineers on our team to scale our client-side code from handling 150,000 points per second to more than 2,000,000 points per second. I learned more about performance optimization in those first weeks than I had in entire semesters.

Three months out of undergrad, I was a primary contributor building our capabilities to decode proprietary data formats on our backend. I understood the entire system end-to-end and the rationale behind every technical decision. Beyond the core product, I’ve become intimately familiar with deployment processes, infrastructure, and how all the pieces fit together in production systems. The opportunity for genuine ownership at Nominal is unmatched.

Nominal has some of the most intelligent, talented people I’ve ever worked with, but absolutely no egos. Everyone is genuinely excited about what they’re building and incredibly down to earth. This was exactly the experience I was looking for: high-impact work alongside incredibly smart people with high variance in the problems, perspectives, and opportunities I’m exposed to every day.

Interested in learning more about Nominal? Visit our Careers page.

I joined Nominal because I wanted to work in an environment that would place the highest expectations on me and pull me out of my comfort zone, since that’s where real growth happens.

In college, I was intentional about taking challenging classes where I’d learn interesting things. But at larger company internships, the bar felt lower. I could do good work, get praised, and earn return offers. This was validating, but not what I was looking for.

At Nominal, people don’t hesitate to give you challenging, high-impact projects just because you’re early in your career. It can be intimidating at first to be given large responsibilities, but it’s also empowering. It means people believe in your ability to accomplish hard, ambiguous tasks.

During my first few months at Nominal, I was put in charge of figuring out how to deploy and operate our software in our first on-premise air-gapped deployment. I was solving problems that the company had never faced before. It was challenging, but with enough team work and brute force, we got the deployment working and passed the required security scans to send it to our customer. I still fondly remember carrying the server from our office to FedEx with Jason, our CTO, and getting it in the hands our a customer.

Since that moment, I’ve gotten the chance to build out the file ingestion pipelines our customers use everyday and dabble into systems programming while working on Nominal Connect, our newest product offering. My time at Nominal so far has felt limitless, and I am so grateful that I’m able to learn constantly alongside so many talented, kind people who challenge and support me.

When you join an early-stage startup like Nominal, the work you do directly contributes to its future success, meaning you’re essentially taking a bet on yourself. As the company grows and scales, so do you, and that’s an opportunity you do not want to miss out on.

Interested in learning more about Nominal? Visit our Careers page.

In previous years, our university recruiting was opportunistic. Last year, we had the pleasure of mentoring two stellar engineering interns, Eric and Eli. They hit the ground running and delivered meaningful outcomes from day one; shipping real features, debugging complex issues, and contributing to systems that our customers depend on.

Their success drove us into this fall recruiting season with an ambitious goal: to hire eight interns and eight new grads for the upcoming summer of 2026. While these numbers might not seem remarkable in absolute terms, they represent a meaningful proportion of our overall engineering headcount (50 people at the time of writing).

Rather than casting a wide net at career fairs, we went directly to students in five cities: Austin, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Boston. At each location, we hosted small group events where we’d demo Nominal (”software for hardware” is very abstract until you see it used to explore data from test flights, rocket launches, and autonomous vehicles) and dive into the unique technical challenges our engineers had to solve when building our product.

As we approach the end of 2025, we’ve filled nearly all sixteen slots, and we couldn’t be more excited about who’s joining. We’re creating an environment where these intelligent, gritty, and highly motivated individuals can truly accelerate their careers.

This year taught us a lot. We learned what university recruiting looks like for Nominal. We learned how to scale our interview pipeline without sacrificing quality. Most importantly, we invested in something that we deeply believe: that university recruiting has an outsized impact on long-term company success.

Here’s to Nominal’s university class of 2026, and many more to come.

Every test engineer deserves Nominal Connect

Nominal Connect is our fully customizable edge platform for test automation. It can be tailored to the most bespoke interfaces and the most stringent runtime requirements. With Connect’s framework, engineers can build apps that just work – apps that read, write, and control physical systems in real-time, without fail.

Since launching three months ago, Connect has taken off. It's now deployed at flight lines, test cells, and labs across aerospace, defense, robotics, and energy. Why? Because hardware engineers deserve better than duct-taped legacy tools. They need test stand human-machine-interfaces (HMIs) that are reliable, fast, flexible, custom, and ready for complex, mission-critical hardware.

That means more than just software. Sometimes, it takes a hardware engineer to solve the intricacies of HMIs across the wide variety of legacy instruments, software, and protocols that make up hardware test.

First-class test stands, not just software

Enter our new Instrumentation Engineers. Much like our Mission Operations team, Instrumentation Engineers don’t rest until our customers see results. Mission outcomes don’t wait for onboarding – neither does Nominal. They sit on the ground next to the machine until the customer can read, write, and control their asset with the press of a button – every time.

Every test setup is different, but our engineers have seen it all. They're fluent in protocols and libraries like SCPI, PyVISA, and PySerial. They're builders and troubleshooters who know how to deliver working systems that stay working – in hangars, cleanrooms, and high-vibration test environments.

Armed with Nominal Connect and years of experience, Instrumentation Engineers make your test stand sing. This isn’t just SaaS; this is a first-class test stand upgrade. Nominal Connect implementation permanently removes a critical obstacle slowing down your test program.

Meet the team

We’re proud to introduce the first full-time members of this growing team:

Patrick Barrett

Why did you join Nominal?

I want to enable engineers to test as fast as they can imagine it.

I’ve been in organizations that invested in their toolchains – they crank out new products and ideas faster and more reliably than those without those means or culture.

When you’re an engineer without a champion wanting to build those platforms, it can be isolating and demoralizing. Nominal has the ability to be that tool maker and champion for these engineers while simultaneously reducing the amount of duplicate work that plagues so many engineering organizations trying to get their first or 40th product out the door.

Prior experience:

• Radiant Nuclear

  • Senior HIL engineer

• Heliogen

  • Principal test engineer

• SpaceX

  • Systems & build engineer for Starship

  • HIL systems engineer, Falcon & Starship

  • Avionic test engineering manager

• National instruments

  • RF test engineer

  • Applications engineer

Noah Schwab

Why did you join Nominal?

Nominal is pursuing a mission that I deeply believe in and has put together the team to get it done. I have the opportunity to work with the most important and innovative hardware companies in the world, helping them build, test, and deploy critical systems. On top of that, I will get to work alongside a team of best-in-industry experts here at Nominal, where I will learn and grow exponentially.

Prior experience:

• MIT Lincoln Laboratory

  • Space systems analysis & test

  • Department of the Air Force Red Team

• Tesla

  • Autopilot hardware

  • Vehicle algorithms test & evaluation

• Astranis

  • Communication systems

  • Network monitoring

• Education

  • MS in Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania

  • BS in Physics, Haverford College

Nominal Connect is rapidly expanding

This is just the start. We firmly believe that Connect should be on every test stand in America. These are the engineers to make it happen.

All systems Nominal!

Learn More

Our goal is to make our champions heroes within their company for choosing Nominal. To make every engineer wonder how they functioned before Nominal implemented continuous test. Our first 90 days with a customer are a sprint to deliver confidence & trust in their tools – because mission timelines don’t wait for onboarding.

Our customers – spanning aerial drones, spacecraft, robotics, nuclear energy, and beyond – need end-to-end systems that perform flawlessly in complex, mission-critical environments. And that requires more than just software. It requires a deeply technical combination of software and hardware from a team willing to get their hands dirty – sometimes literally.

This is where our Mission Team steps in.

The Mission Team turns potential energy into kinetic energy

Imagine engineers who spend their mornings deep in analytics software, afternoons integrating hardware sensors, and evenings walking flight lines or test ranges alongside our customers. This is the essence of Nominal’s Mission team: deeply technical, relentlessly curious, and trusted advisors to every customer they support.

There are two roles within Nominal’s Mission Team: Mission Ops and Mission Dev.
The Mission Ops team ensures that Nominal’s technology exceeds expectations in the real world. They handle program management, onboard users, tailor software deployments, and deliver essential training, directly embedding with customer teams to ensure success. At the same time, our Mission Dev specialists handle critical "last-mile" data integrations and rapidly deliver new software capabilities based on what they learn in the field with our users.

Our work depends on a deep understanding of the customer’s mission: their timelines, their priorities, their existing tools and resources. The Mission team provides the hands-on support that customers need to unlock the full potential of Nominal’s software and accelerate their milestones.

Experts in their field – from almost every field

The Mission Team brings diverse backgrounds: hardware engineering, project management, advanced software – from Palantir, SpaceX, Anduril, NASA JPL, Pratt & Whitney, Applied Intuition, Kuka Robotics, Samsara, and every branch of the US military. This broad expertise allows Nominal to tackle any set of challenges that our customers face. Whether it's supporting drone flights, spacecraft telemetry, nuclear safety, or robotic automation, Nominal deploys a tailored Mission Team to ensure our technology delivers maximum performance exactly when and where it's needed most.

Shaping the future of Nominal with the voice of the customer

Beyond immediate deployments, the Mission Team shapes the future of Nominal’s technology. By translating field experience into actionable product requirements, they guide our software roadmap, collaborating directly with our engineering teams. From incremental feature improvements to entirely new applications, Mission Ops continuously pushes the velocity of our product development.

Meet Joe Holliday, Head of Mission

Q: What drew you to Nominal?

Joe: An incredibly strong team, the coolest customers, and an ambitious vision to ignite the next industrial revolution. We’re not just solving theoretical problems; we’re directly impacting the pace of fielding critical next-generation hardware systems.

Q: How does your past experience shape the way you run the Mission Team?

Joe: Our mission team was inspired by the Forward Deployed Engineers at Palantir, where we embedded with customers to deeply understand the problem at hand and iterate quickly to ship game-changing capabilities. Our very own Ross Barrett – now the lead of our Mission Dev team - did exactly this with robust time series capabilities for industrial customers. We've brought that mindset here: Mission Ops isn't about support tickets, it’s about boots on the ground. Every Mission teammate at Nominal brings substantial real-world experience, combining software expertise with practical hardware engineering and firsthand familiarity working side-by-side with customers.

Q: Can you share an example of how Mission Ops impacted a customer mission?

Joe: Just about every customer has an amazing Nominal story, but the one that always comes to mind is Shield AI. It was one of our first customers where we had a huge, concrete impact, accelerating their testing cadence by an order of magnitude and helping them out-pace their own timelines. Nominal has truly become mission-critical for how they operate – it’s always fun to go on-site and see Nominal workbooks flashing up on countless monitors.

Q: What's your vision for the future of Mission Operations at Nominal?

Joe: Mission Operations will continue to grow as the backbone connecting Nominal’s software to real-world mission success. We’ll deepen our customer relationships, broaden our industry expertise, and further integrate real-time operational feedback into product innovation. We’re proud to be given our customers’ thorniest data problems where we can have the largest impact. Ultimately, we want every customer mission to accelerate because our team was involved.

Meet the mission team

Our mission team is growing! Learn more about a them from the deep dives below:

• Kimberly Lancarte

• Nick Peng

• Charlie Kniffin

• Josh Lizotte

• Sandi Mihaylova

Apply to Nominal

Q: Tell us about your professional background.

A: I was in the Air Force for ten years and most of my work centered around the development and deployment of new technology and software. I’ve spent time at NSA, DIU and the Maui High Performance Computing Center working in various domains including cyber, logistics, mission planning, and space domain awareness. Beyond that, career highlights include serving on the faculty at the Air Force Academy and a deployment with NATO.

Q: What are you excited to “run with” at Nominal?

A: Nominal is well-positioned to both advance commercial technologies and ensure their effectiveness for national defense. There is potential here to set a new standard, break the “producer-consumer” mold that has characterized DoD acquisition, and usher in a more collaborative and productive partnership between industry and the DoD. I’m excited to leverage my background to realize that potential.

Q: Why did you choose to join Nominal?

A: Considering potential next steps after ten years in the military, there were some things I was looking to change (no big bureaucracies), and others that I wanted to maintain (being a part of a mission-driven organization). Nominal met these criteria and more. From talent to product, I think Nominal has gotten the formula right and it’s an exciting place to be!

Q: How would you describe your first impression of working at Nominal?

A: Everyone is bright and talented, but also collaborative and humble and kind.

Q: What is one thing you are obsessed with?

A: The interesting answer is surfing - it’s been a lot of fun to learn a new sport as an adult and I always make an effort to go when conditions are good. That said, the more honest answer is my cat, Hina.

Q: How do you stay grounded?

A: Anything active in nature - hiking, surfing, mountain biking makes me feel good.

STEPHANIE YU
Software Engineer (Front end)
Former software engineer at Palantir Technologies

Q: Tell us about your professional background.

A: I started at Palantir after graduation as a frontend developer. The first several years was a tour of application development working on a variety of frontend apps in the early days of Foundry. From there I helped spin up the initial Foundry FE build infrastructure team, which unified Foundry’s FE build tooling and moved everything into a monorepo. The last few years at Palantir were primarily focused on product development (specifically App Building and the Ontology SDK), frontend engineering leadership, and helping to bridge the gap between product and infrastructure.

Q: What are you excited to “run with” at Nominal?

A: Everything, to be honest! I was excited about the idea of figuring out where I’m needed most and just going for it, and the team being very welcoming of that approach.

Q: Why did you choose to join Nominal?

A: The team! It was clear to me that this was a stacked team with smart and thoughtful engineers motivated to build high-quality product. I was also excited about the idea of building software for hardware, as that’s always been a side passion of mine.

Q: How would you describe your first impression of working at Nominal?

A: Nominal is moving fast, which is a lot of fun, yet at the same time everyone is able to be level-headed and thoughtful about the long-term journey.

Q: What is one thing you are obsessed with?

A: Hydroponics! And figuring out how to keep the tomatoes that are toxic to the cat out of reach.

Q: How do you stay grounded?

A: A lot of side projects – my brain usually needs to stay engaged somehow, so I just need to redirect it. Cooking and baking are pretty zen too.

CHARLIE KNIFFIN
Mission Operations
Former test engineer at Pratt & Whitney and Lawrence Livermore

Q: Tell us about your professional background.

A: I got drawn to engineering through working on cars. That created a long-term affiliation with the UConn Formula SAE team, which helped me land my first job at Pratt & Whitney doing flight test instrumentation. I worked on the Mitsubishi Regional Jet program and eventually moved to the data analysis side. Working in that part of the company planted the seeds for what would grow into my career at Nominal. After leaving PW, I went to Lawrence Livermore, which is a really unique environment where you are solving completely unique problems. I’ve also spent time working on humanoid robots at Agility!

Q: What are you excited to “run with” at Nominal?

A: My goal is to make sure we delight the customer. Coming to Nominal gives me the opportunity to help create the tools I wish I had at my prior jobs, where I was consistently frustrated with outdated data analysis tooling that was nearly impossible to maintain. I’m super excited to be the voice of the customer and combine all my past experience to help bring the future of data analysis to them.

Q: Why did you choose to join Nominal?

A: This is a full circle moment for me. To come back four years departed from my analysis role and get the opportunity to build the next generation of tooling was just too perfect.

Q: How would you describe your first impression of working at Nominal?

A: The team here is amazing. Everyone is incredibly talented and really passionate about what they are working on.

Q: What is one thing you are obsessed with?

A: Triathlon. I got into it when I was working in the Bay Area, and I’ve turned from someone who dreaded running a mile to looking at a Half Ironman in the next year.

Q: How do you stay grounded?

A: Race training and spending time with my friends. I love getting out and going on a run, bike, or a swim.

MAX NAJORK
Software Engineer (Mission Dev)
Former deployment and software engineer at Palantir and Chronosphere

Q: Tell us about your professional background.

A: I joined Palantir out of school, where I spent two years as a Forward Deployed Engineer supporting Airbus in Europe, and then four years as a Software Engineer on our observability team.
I joined Chronosphere after Palantir. They were solving many of the pain-points that I felt with existing observability solutions during my tenure at Palantir. I worked with a few teams at Chronosphere, including a cross-functional team that handled high-priority customer features (similar to Nominal’s Mission Dev), API and storage tooling, and platform search and navigation.
Finally, I joined Radiant AI, an AI tooling company founded by a couple people I knew from Palantir. I really enjoyed the excitement that came with joining as employee #1. Unfortunately, we struggled to find product market fit, which is what brought me to Nominal.

Q: What are you excited to “run with” at Nominal?

A: It seems like there’s tons of demand for what Nominal is building. I’m excited to help meet that demand and ensure that customers get value out of our platform. There’s definitely product market fit, and with that comes a fun set of problems to solve to meet the demand.

Q: Why did you choose to join Nominal?

A: I knew a couple people on the team. It seemed like they were building something interesting, so I reached out to learn more. When I came onsite for the interview, I had a chance to see a product demo and meet some of the broader team, and I was thoroughly impressed with what I saw. It made the decision to join easy.

Q: How would you describe your first impression of working at Nominal?

A: There’s a lot of work ahead of us, but in a good way. There’s a real opportunity to create something big here. That’s exciting to me - the work that we put in is directly correlated to what we get out of it.

Q: What is one thing you are obsessed with?

A: Chocolate chip cookies. My wife and I make a big batch of cookie dough and bake a fresh one every night.

Q: How do you stay grounded?

A: I like to stay active, whether it’s going to the gym, running, swimming, biking, skiing, whatever. It gives me a chance to turn off my brain and enjoy the moment.

WESLEY GOW
Business Operations
Former associate consultant at Bain & Company

Q: Tell us about your professional background.

A: I have always had an entrepreneurial spirit, whether working part-time at an incubator, or pursuing my own ventures. I started and sold two small companies of my own while in college, and I also helped DeepWalk secure their first round of funding. Upon graduation, I joined Bain to build a generalist toolkit and work on hard problems with great people. After a bit, I felt called to return to the startup world, which led me to Nominal!

Q: What are you excited to “run with” at Nominal?

A: Across multiple functions, I’m excited to help Nominal’s internal processes function as a well-oiled, scalable machine (without losing the scrappy startup magic, of course!). Whether that’s finance, growth, investor relations, etc., I’ll be working to make sure we’re operating as smoothly as possible so that everyone else can focus on building great product.

Q: Why did you choose to join Nominal?

A: Across all different kinds of pursuits in my life, I have found it very rewarding to work on hard problems with great people who are mission-aligned. I joined Nominal because I believe it perfectly fits that description. Everyone here believes in the company mission, and I am excited to work in a fast-paced, high-energy environment to help solve the hardest problems.

Q: How would you describe your first impression of working at Nominal?

A: Everyone that I have met has been a unique combination of competent and kind; highly focused on their work, but also committed to welcoming me to Nominal. I feel like it is relatively common to find one or the other, but the combination is pretty amazing. It feels like a place where everyone is focused on delivering high-quality work and is excited about doing so.

Q: What is one thing you are obsessed with?

A: I have all kinds of obsessions that have pulled me in lots of different directions! At UChicago, I was a captain of the football team, a treasurer for the chess club, a speaker for our student philosophy group, and an avid member of musicals, intramural sports, and other student organizations. I’ve been able to work on a lot of different kinds of teams and loved the variety of experiences that have come from my obsessions.

This is incredibly niche, but I love creating & collecting good antimetaboles while I’m reading / writing (cool quotes / aphorisms where you flip words around to make new meanings in the sentence—particularly cool when you’re using a homonym to change the function). Ex: “Questions we cannot answer are far better for us than answers we cannot question.”

Q: How do you stay grounded?

A: Being creative / artistic in some shape or form. I find it forces me to slow down and use different parts of my brain when I’ve been working a lot. I enjoy playing piano and am currently writing a book.

JOSH LIZOTTE
Mission Operations
Former project manager at Axon and the US Navy

Q: What are you excited to “run with” at Nominal?

A: Standing shoulder to shoulder with our DoD customers to be able to both accelerate their own mission accomplishment using the Nominal platform and to push the bounds of what we deliver to further enhance the toolkit that we offer.

Q: Why did you choose to join Nominal?

A: Upon interacting with the team members and seeing the velocity of Nominal’s development efforts, it was obvious to me that Nominal’s product offerings are already becoming necessary for fast-paced hardware development across mission-critical areas. I am more than excited to have the opportunity to insert myself at the leading edge of these development efforts with Nominal!

Q: How would you describe your first impression of working at Nominal?

A: Absolute confirmation of all my reasons to initially join. The team is brilliant and cares so deeply about driving solutions for our customers while maintaining an everyday collegiate atmosphere that stokes collaboration.

Q: What is one thing you are obsessed with?

A: Dovetailing with my professional world, the national security space and efforts to respond to the rapidly changing geopolitical and technological environment is an area where I cannot help but consume any and all media that I can get my hands on. I am more than happy to stay up late reading international publications for their perspectives on the space or give up an evening to listen to a lecture from a senior official. This, and trance music of course.

Q: How do you stay grounded?

A: When I break away from my obsession and truly disconnect, I love to road bike and scuba and am (slowly) working to visit all our nation’s national parks!

Q: Tell us about your professional background.

A: I enjoy working at fast paced companies with brilliant co-workers, and I’ve optimized for organizations that allow me to wear many hats.

• While I was at Citadel, I was focused on helping researchers build out ETL and compute frameworks, with an emphasis on improving reliability and speed of research. A consistent core of the work I performed at Citadel was centered around supporting coordinated compute amongst a wide variety of programming language—for example, supporting a workflow that fetched data from KDB with Q+, processed the data using math libraries in R, and plotting / visualization in python.

• When at Applied, I initially worked on the Offroad Autonomy team, across the stack wearing all of the hats—some days I would build out CI/CD pipelines and automated OTA deployment systems for deploying the latest software to vehicle, other days, I would optimize perception algorithms (lidar / radar / camera) to perform better on embedded compute on vehicle. After a year and a half, I transitioned to the Government Services team, which entailed using our suite of products to complete various bespoke contracts ranging from creating and running an autonomy evaluation program with the Army to combining our products in novel ways to enable evaluating tele-op capabilities with mocked crew-stations and HIL setups.

Q: What are you excited to “run with” at Nominal?

A: I’m most excited to allow organizations to begin deriving insights into what went wrong during testing— never again should an engineer have to transcribe the contents of CSV files over the phone to help other engineers debug something going wrong during field testing!

Q: Why did you choose to join Nominal?

A: Business trajectory, investor pedigree, culture, world-class teammates, and a kick-ass product.

Q: How would you describe your first impression of working at Nominal?

A: Like standing downstream in front of a firehose—it’s been a constant stream of new technologies, data formats, and customers that’s kept me learning new things every moment of each day.

Q: What is one thing you are obsessed with?

A: I adore pushing computers to their limits—nothing brings me joy like pushing a computer to 100% utilization to make data processing work orders of magnitudes faster than the naive single-threaded approach. I love taking a script that takes an hour to run and figuring out how to make it finish before my coffee is done brewing.

Q: How do you stay grounded?

A: In the world of startups, there are no individual winners or losers—we either all win together, or we all lose together. When things get heated, it’s essential to remember that we are all working together to achieve a common goal, and that it doesn’t matter who’s right or wrong so long as we collectively make the product better in the end.

Q: Tell us about your professional background.

A: After college, I worked in New York for real estate developer, Edison Properties, as a business strategist building tools to track KPIs and dynamically price based on customer website behavior. I then went to law school with the idea of using similar data-driven technology to further national security.

After law school, I clerked for two years in federal court before working at two D.C. law firms, Baker Botts and Arnold & Porter, in their corporate national security practices, which involved assisting clients with CFIUS and antitrust clearances for deals, helping defense contractors in their dealings with the government, and advising on export and sanctions compliance.

I then joined Palantir to help build the legal and contracting side of its USG Business, and to lead the national security compliance program. Among other things, I was lead attorney for the company’s Intelligence Community business and Army TITAN program, and I helped build the USG Partnerships team. I also worked on its public listing and subsequently led various scaling efforts.

Most recently, I joined Covariant as its first attorney. As General Counsel and Head of InfoSec, I matured the company’s cybersecurity and data privacy programs in anticipation of a sale, developed the company’s IP, data, and partner strategies, and helped negotiate its successful exit to Amazon.

Q: What are you excited to “run with” at Nominal?

A: At Nominal, I’m excited to build a best in class legal and compliance org focused on enabling U.S. national security and industrial resilience.

This includes high-velocity contracting and being a responsible, compliant company, while also being a leader in surfacing regulatory hurdles that product-driven defense innovators face. These hurdles can act at cross-purposes with the broader mission, and I am eager for Nominal to be at the forefront of making positive change in this area.

This is also a particularly eventful time for USG <> infosec, with the final CMMC 2.0 rule taking effect this December. I’m pumped to be here in advance of that as we shape Nominal’s approach.

Q: Why did you choose to join Nominal?

A: First and foremost the leadership, the team, and the culture. But also a growing market with a need for innovative new entrants native to today’s software-defined approach.

I know it’s cliche, but I think culture trumps strategy in 99% of cases, even if, ideally, you have both. In looking across startups, I knew I wanted to be in defense tech but, more specifically than that, at a company oriented around real outcomes to solve meaningful challenges in the national security space. I had seen the evolution of software-defined hardware at Palantir, and saw the real challenges of iterating on novel hardware solutions at Covariant using legacy tools from an analog era. I love Nominal’s laser focus on solving test and validation using modern data science techniques. Especially as the defense and space ecosystem, enabled by cloud data infrastructure and lower cost launch services, grows to meet the significant national security needs of the present moment.

Q: How would you describe your first impression of working at Nominal?

A: My first impression of Nominal is this is a team that sweats the details! Having grown with Palantir from a private company, through the listing process, to the scaling stage afterward (during Covid no less), I have some perspective on right-sizing operations, workflows, and processes to meet the work of the company and what it needs to optimize for at a given moment in time. I appreciate here that there’s a lightweight but thoughtful Notion or Google Doc covering key operational topics (e.g., comparing the distinct but overlapping data security regimes we work with, specifying a schema for Slack organization etc.). As a new employee, it makes a strong positive impression that within a high-performing, high-velocity startup in a hard technical area, the leadership and team have still prioritized investing in these types of detailed resources. It gives me a lot of confidence that we are prepared to meet scaling challenges as we continue to grow fast.

Q: What is one thing you are obsessed with?

A: I love the unique cocktail of emerging company legal work in the national security space, where the mission is second to none, the regulations are old and vague, and velocity is paramount.

Q: How do you stay grounded?

A: Spending time with my wife (Melissa) and three daughters (Alani, Devyn, and Perri). Tennis, skiing, and hiking where there is time outside of shuttling said daughters to their various activities. And lastly, travel! While we’ve been all over, there will always be a special place in my heart for Santander, Spain where I spent three summers growing up and remain close with the family from my initial high school exchange program there.

Q: Tell us about your professional background.

A: I became interested in signals and sensing early in my career while doing applied mathematics research during my undergraduate studies. I worked on frequency-based imaging problems (e.g., MRI, radar) and later transitioned into computer vision. After graduating, I left academia for industry and joined a home automation startup, Orro, where I developed presence detection for a home lighting system using multiple sensors.

In mid-2019, I joined Anduril as one of the first computer vision engineers on the recommendation of a university friend. I immediately started working on Anvil, a counter-drone quadcopter that smashes drones out of the sky. I built Anduril’s Python infrastructure and counter-UAS analysis tools, enabling engineers to effectively analyze complex multi-robot systems. We spun up a team focused on the data engineering required for robotics and perception, creating a data management platform, ETL pipelines, and job-running infrastructure for training ML models, processing robotics data, and generating reports and visualizations. Eventually, I came back to robotics to lead the Anvil software team, delivering a new guidance stack and Anvil’s munition variant, Anvil-M.

Q: What are you excited to “run with” at Nominal?

A: I thrive on helping engineers perform their best analyses. Tooling profoundly impacts how deeply engineers can explore their problems. I find it frustrating when I can’t dig into a problem because the data wasn’t persisted long enough, extracting data requires hours of manual effort, or tools misrepresent what’s happening. I’m energized to focus on improving our client libraries, APIs, and integration points so our customers can concentrate on their systems instead of pipelines.

Q: Why did you choose to join Nominal?

A: Nominal is uniquely positioned to solve problems that most companies can only dedicate small teams to address. Startups, especially hardware-focused ones, rarely have the resources to build this type of platform in-house. Many existing data platforms and analysis toolchains impose rigid structures on data types and ETL pipelines, requiring engineers to write additional code just to view their data. It doesn’t have to be this way, and Nominal’s engineers deeply understand that. We’re building the rapid-analysis toolbox for hard tech, and that’s an incredibly impactful product to create today.

Q: How would you describe your first impression of working at Nominal?

A: It’s refreshing to see the entire company mission-aligned and focused. I expected the pace to be fast, but I didn’t anticipate that every feature and workflow would be so thoroughly designed and executed. We run internal demos weekly, which fosters a culture where ideas and excellence are celebrated. It’s common for an engineer to surprise the team with a novel extension to our platform they hacked together, and really invigorating that everyone is pushing the boundaries of the product.

Q: What is one thing you are obsessed with?

A: NixOS/nixpkgs is my favorite Linux distro and package manager, including for macOS, and I highly recommend giving the ecosystem a try! If you’re new to Nix & NixOS, this recent explainer from Surma is a fantastic introduction. For macOS users, I suggest checking out dreamsofautonomy’s practical guide on using Nix to declaratively manage packages and system configurations.

Q: How do you stay grounded?

A: Music has always been an important part of my life. I listen to a wide range of genres, including electronic, singer/songwriter, jazz, alt-pop, and metal. I have some synthesizers I play with at home, and I’ve been learning jazz harmonic theory recently. I try to attend shows as often as I can, from small indie venues to massive clubs. Not that you asked, but here are a few tracks from my Liked Songs I’ve been jamming to recently:

• Magdalena Bay – Image

• Zoe’s Shanghai – Saint Vibe and Time

• Adriatique, Undercatt – Horizon

• St. Vincent – Hell Is Near

• Max Tundra – MBGATE – Kero Kero Bonito Remix

Q: Tell us about your professional background.

A: I was fortunate to begin my career at JPL, where I developed an end-to-end indoor localization system for firefighter safety—a project that involved extensive hardware and software field testing. I also collaborated with JPL's Robotics teams, gaining valuable experience in sensor fusion and autonomy development. This experience led me to Applied Intuition, where I became the first Systems Engineer on the Off-road Autonomy team. There, I worked closely with customers and development teams on system requirements and test cases to build autonomy-enabled vehicles.

Q: What are you excited to “run with” at Nominal?

A: I’m excited to build strong relationships with our amazing customers, understand the challenges they face, and help them empower their mission by leveraging Nominal’s products. I’m eager to help create the tools I always wished I had, while learning from the talented engineering team here.

Q: Why did you choose to join Nominal?

A: When I first saw Nominal's product demo, I instantly wished I'd had these tools for my past projects—they would have saved countless hours of scripting and troubleshooting. The team's deep experience and clear understanding of our users' pain points impressed me. I knew Nominal had huge potential, and I wanted to be a part of the incredible growth!

Q: How would you describe your first impression of working at Nominal?

A: Everyone in the company is super driven, motivated, and fun to be around! The team understands what customers want and effectively balances speed with quality to deliver great features to our customers!

Q: What is one thing you are obsessed with?

A: I'm obsessed with all things audio! I've enjoyed working as an audio tech for live events and mixing sound for friends' films. Audio is a fascinating blend of technology and art!

Q: How do you stay grounded?

A: My wife and I enjoy going snowboarding in Colorado every year!

Q: Tell us about your professional background.

A: This is my first job out of college! In my most recent internship experience at Datadog, I worked on an internal tools team where I got exposure to Kubernetes and Temporal. During school, my coursework mostly focused on systems programming and applied math.

Q: What are you excited to “run with” at Nominal?

A: Learning anything and everything with urgency to help Nominal win and make an amazing product. Rather than just being a traditional software engineer, I hope to also interact with customers to understand their pain points, brainstorm solutions, and do my best to grow the company in any way I can.

Q: Why did you choose to join Nominal?

A: I’ve always been interested in the intersection of hardware and software, and I wanted to have the experience of building software from the ground up at an early-stage company.

Q: How would you describe your first impression of working at Nominal?

A: The strict no-asshole policy is true! Everyone at Nominal is incredibly kind, hardworking, and holds themselves to high standards.

Q: What is one thing you are obsessed with?

A: I’ve been long-distance running since high school, and I love all the sidequests that come with it! One summer, I challenged myself to run across as many bridges on the Charles River as possible, as a way to explore my home state (MA), and ended up getting to 24.

Q: How do you stay grounded?

A: I try to be selective with my time by prioritizing the people and activities that bring me the most fulfillment and taking care of my mental health by staying fit and going to therapy.

Q: Tell us about your professional background.

A: I was previously at Palantir for nearly eight years, working across a number of teams and projects. Most recently, I was the Tech Lead of the Modeling team, building out infrastructure for ML and AI engineers to train and deploy models on top of their data.

Q: What are you excited to “run with” at Nominal?

A: Seeing high-quality software deployed across industry is really motivating to me – I’m excited to engaged with hardware engineers and empower them to deliver on ambitious, complex projects more effectively.

Q: Why did you choose to join Nominal?

A: I was super impressed by the founding team and their backgrounds, and I felt like they were the right people to deliver on Nominal’s mission.

Q: How would you describe your first impression of working at Nominal?

A: So far, it’s been great—high-autonomy and full of thoughtful, passionate people.

Q: What is one thing you are obsessed with?

A: On the technical side, I’m a big fan of the Rust programming language and am excited to see it gain adoption. Compiled languages have long-required arcane knowledge and hard-won experience. On a personal level, I love wine and have a WSET Level 2 certification!

Q: How do you stay grounded?

A: I try to disconnect as much as possible when on vacation – it helps to have some time to sit back and recharge.

Q: Tell us about your professional background.

A: I’ve worked in a variety of industries, including oil & gas, industrial robotics, and construction technology. In each role, I’ve focused on understanding customer pain points and translating them into actionable service or product requirements. Most recently, I drove the 0-to-1 development of ICON Technologies’ internal BIM platform.

Q: What are you excited to “run with” at Nominal?

A: Defining what true value and success means for us. I firmly believe a product thrives when its users thrive, and I’m excited to build strong relationships with our customers, supporting them in reaching their objectives.

Q: Why did you choose to join Nominal?

A: It’s all about the product and team! I love working on products that bridge the digital and physical worlds. Delivering a software tool that enables hardware engineers to push the boundaries of physics is incredibly exciting. Plus, I stay motivated when I’m surrounded by high agency teammates.

Q: How would you describe your first impression of working at Nominal?

A: Every day, I’m increasingly impressed with the team’s clock speed. I’ve experienced clear communication, solid organization, and high productivity individually before, but never all together at this caliber.

Q: What is one thing you are obsessed with?

A: One product I’ve recently become obsessed with is my Parallele toiletry bag. I travel a lot and go to the gym regularly, and this bag has significantly reduced my packing time. I love telling fellow travelers and gym enthusiasts about it.

Q: How do you stay grounded?

A: My upbringing played a huge role in shaping my worldview. I was taught that people from all walks of life have something valuable to contribute and something they can teach you. Also, being a parent is pretty humbling on a daily basis, ha!

Q: Tell us about your professional background.

A: I enjoy investing in, operating, and taking-to-market early-stage technical companies. Prior to my time at Nominal, I was the cofounder & CEO of Plotly and founder & CEO of Flojoy.

Q: What are you excited to “run with” at Nominal?

A: Nominal will reach a point where next-gen hardware teams cannot develop without it – just like modern software teams cannot develop without platforms like GitHub. I’m excited to help drive the product towards that inflection point.

Q: Why did you choose to join Nominal?

A: I started my career in hardware, so the team and product felt like coming home in many ways.

Q: How would you describe your first impression of working at Nominal?

A: The team are world-class humans—empathetic, social, kind, humble, and absurdly accomplished, with a range of interests and skills.

Q: What is one thing you are obsessed with?

A: Open-source and the craftspeople around it.

Q: How do you stay grounded?

A: Movies. My kids. Walking and thinking.