University Recruiting 2025: A Retrospective

When I joined a startup after graduating from college, I was given real autonomy, trusted with meaningful projects, and pushed far outside my comfort zone. The growth I experienced during those first few years out of school shaped my career. It's a common story I hear from my peers, and it's one we want to create for the next generation here at Nominal.

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.