Roboticist In Residence

About NominalNominal is a venture-backed company with offices in Los Angeles, Austin, and New York City. We build software and data solutions for organizations, testing and validating complex systems—think drones, robots, rocket engines, and satellites. Backed by top investors like General Catalyst, Founders Fund, and Lux Capital, we’re gaining momentum across the commercial and government aerospace and defense ecosystem, including direct work with the Department of Defense.
Our team includes alumni from SpaceX, Palantir, Anduril, Lockheed Martin, and NASA, united by a mission: accelerate hardware innovation by making testing faster, smarter, and easier. Our platform helps engineering teams scale their test infrastructure and gain insight from high-throughput, high-complexity test data.
As Roboticist-in-Residence, You’ll...Bring deep robotics expertise to Nominal’s test and autonomy stack. You’ll serve as the in-house expert for robotic system integration and perception pipelines, helping bridge the gap between advanced robotics systems and real-world test infrastructure. You’ll work hands-on across our customer base—drones, UGVs, manipulators, and more—accelerating their ability to validate autonomy and perception using Nominal Connect.
This role is highly technical, customer-facing, and exploratory: a mix of R&D, field deployment, and product shaping. You should feel at home debugging CAN bus issues on a flight controller, optimizing reinforcement learning loop performance, or visualizing test runs in Nominal Connect and complementary tools like Foxglove, Rerun, or Mujoco.

🚀 What You’ll Do

• Own Autonomy Integration: Interface robotic systems with Nominal Connect—CAN bus, cameras, control loops, and autonomy stack.
• Perception & RL Tooling: Build pipelines within Nominal Connect to support vision-based navigation, object detection, and real-time feedback into reinforcement learning loops.
• Sim & Visualize: Integrate simulation and visualization environments into Nominal Connect—including tools like Mujoco, Isaac Gym, and Rerun—to streamline validation workflows.
• Support Customers: Deploy on-site with autonomy teams and test operators to integrate with their robots and support missions using Nominal Connect as the foundation.
• Build Reusable Interfaces: Develop general-purpose modules in Nominal Connect for handling CAN, video, telemetry, and actuator data across platforms.
• Guide Product Direction: Influence Connect’s roadmap with insights from field deployments and robotic system users.

🔍 Who You Are

• Experienced Roboticist: You've built and deployed robotic systems—whether in research, startups, or field operations.
• CAN Bus Expert: Comfortable debugging low-level communications and writing interfaces for robotic subsystems.
• Computer Vision Pro: Experience with perception pipelines—monocular/stereo VO, object tracking, pose estimation, etc.
• RL + Sim Enthusiast: Familiar with reinforcement learning workflows and simulation environments—ideally integrated through Nominal Connect and tools like Mujoco or Isaac Gym.
• Debugging Mindset: Thrive in fast-moving, ambiguous environments where you debug cross-disciplinary systems.
• Tooling Savvy: Hands-on with Nominal Connect and visual tooling like Rerun or Foxglove for robotics telemetry and autonomy stack debugging.
• Technical Polyglot: Proficient in Python, with working knowledge of C++ or Rust when needed.

🌟 Bonus Points

• Worked on fielded autonomous systems (drones, quadrupeds, mobile robots)
• Experience with time-synced telemetry pipelines (e.g. ROS 2, MCAP, or LCM)
• Built simulation-test loops or hardware-in-the-loop testbeds
• Former contributor to robotics competitions or open-source autonomy stacks

✨ Benefits & Perks

• 🏥 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance
• 🏖️ Unlimited PTO and sick leave
• 🍽️ Free lunch, snacks, and coffee
• 🚀 Professional Development Stipend
• ✈️ Annual company retreats

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin.