Mission Ops: Delivering outcomes, not just tools
An inside look at Nominal’s Mission Team – On-site engineers dedicated to solving our customers' hardest problems
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: