Mission Dev at Nominal: Solving Software Problems in Hardware Domains

Mission Dev is one of the most unique roles at Nominal — part software engineer, part product manager, part field engineer. Recently, a candidate asked some great questions about what the role actually looks like. Here's what we discussed.

What does the day-to-day actually look like?

Mission Devs are not brought in for every customer; we're only brought in when there's a specific need to bridge a technical gap between what our product offers and what’s required for the customer outcome.

We might get looped in at any point in a customer's lifecycle. Sometimes it's pre-sales, where we'll integrate their data to show them how Nominal fits into their workflows. Other times, we're building customer-specific tooling or extending the product in ways that one customer needs but can ultimately benefit everyone.

A good example: we had a customer filming their test flights. They wanted to view video alongside their telemetry data. So we built a pipeline to ingest, store, and load video into workbooks. That started as a customer-specific need and became a core product feature.

The work itself is split between on-site visits and focused office time. Going on-site is valuable for two main reasons: collecting information about the problem (watching how users actually work, shoulder-surfing their processes) and getting feedback on what you've built. We learn so much by putting a feature in someone's hands and watching how they naturally try to interact with it.

How does the role evolve as the product matures?

If we're doing our job effectively (not just on Mission Dev, but across the entire engineering and product organization) then what Mission Dev works on should evolve over time.

Here's how I think about it: our product should get customers most of the way to a solution out of the box. But sometimes it won't get them all the way there. Mission Dev bridges that last 10% gap, and that 10% looks different across customers.

We should take the common ground we're finding across the last 10% solutions and incorporate it into the core product. Then as other customers encounter the same problems, they can reuse what we built for those first use cases.

For example, early in Nominal’s journey, Mission Dev spent a lot of time helping customers get their data into Nominal. We wrote a lot of custom pipelines for various data formats. Now we've baked that functionality into our client libraries and backend, so unless it's a very bespoke format, customers can generally ingest data without our help.

As the workflows we're solving evolve, as we cover more industries and more use cases, that last 10% bridge keeps evolving too. As our customer base grows, the number of domain-specific speculative product bets we can work on also increases.

What does growth look like?

Mission Dev is crucial to Nominal's success. It's how we as a company learn where our product needs to grow and where there are opportunities for new products. Companies that do this well transform the world.

The feedback loops on the team are incredibly fast. People learn fastest by trying things, seeing where they fall short, and iterating. On Mission Dev, you're shipping a feature on Monday, watching a customer use it onsite on Tuesday, and making changes that same day based on their feedback. This accelerates your growth in ways that are hard to replicate on other teams.

You become a go-to expert. You'll develop deep expertise in specific workflows and customer domains. Maybe you become the person who understands flight test engineers better than anyone else at the company, or the expert in manufacturing line integration. This means you're communicating with product teams about roadmap priorities, with the sales team about how to position features, and with leadership about strategic opportunities.

You're on the ground floor of future products. The best bets made by Mission Dev often become entire product teams. That video capability I mentioned earlier started as a Mission Dev project for one customer and became a core feature used across the platform. You're making early product bets that could become major pillars of Nominal's platform, and contribute to those efforts as they scale.

The common theme that ties this together is ownership of customer outcomes. You're learning about our users' most pressing problems, designing solutions, building them, deploying them, and measuring their impact. Because you spend so much time interfacing with customers and building user empathy, you form a deep understanding of what users are trying to do, what's working in the product, what's not, and where there are investment opportunities.

Growth in this role is about solving these problems, whether it's connecting them to the right people and providing your insights to help move the needle, or contributing to the solution yourself. Over time, the scope of these problems and their impact on Nominal's bottom line will increase, and you'll take on even larger challenges.

What’s your favorite part of the job?

That sense of contributing to customers succeeding in their mission is the best part of the role.

The first customer I worked with flew their aircraft for the first time a month ago. Ultimately, they're the ones who did all the work to make that happen, but it was incredibly cool spending time with their engineers, helping them use Nominal to analyze their flight data, and seeing how excited they were to use the product that we built compared to the other tools they had before.

At Nominal, you get to see behind the scenes at all these different companies, across different industries, all doing cutting-edge work. More often than not, they’re quite open to hosting us onsite and showing us what they're building.

I didn't come from a hardware background. I'd done pure software work at other companies. Working at the intersection of software and hardware has given me the chance to learn what the hardware tech stacks look like. They're complex, and can be rough around the edges, leading to gnarly technical problems. But these are the problems we love at Nominal, because the use cases they unlock and the physical systems that they enable directly shape our future.

Where is Nominal headed?

We found our initial value driver: a consolidated data layer for hardware telemetry with analytical tooling for post-test analysis on top of it. But there’s a lot of power that lies in the core data layer.

We're starting to explore batch analysis, automating processes through Nominal, and integrating with manufacturing systems. We're looking at what the evolution of our data layer and ingest layer looks like: mesh networks of multiple Nominal nodes at test sites, and logic running on-device to stream data directly into Nominal.

The verticals we're targeting are also expanding. We had early success in aviation with planes and drones. We’re working with energy companies and robotics companies. But there are a lot of other industries building hardware systems that generate tons of time series data: automotive, industrial manufacturing, and more.

Mission Dev sits at the tip of the spear with customer engagement. We're actively in the loop with customers as we're building, acting as a conduit for product feedback. Once features ship, we figure out where the next frontier is.

If you're interested in Mission Dev or just want to chat about what we're building at Nominal, let’s connect!

Mission Dev Application: https://jobs.gem.com/nominal/e0f3ee8b-0030-4506-a6e2-da0710d90a05

Careers at Nominal: https://nominal.io/careers