Lead Sales Engineer

About Nominal Nominal is building the software infrastructure powering the world’s most advanced hardware systems — from spacecraft and autonomous vehicles to next-generation industrial machines. Our platform ingests high-rate telemetry, validates complex autonomy software in real time, and enables engineers to iterate faster without sacrificing safety or precision. We’re a small, fast-moving team of engineers and operators who own problems end-to-end, work across disciplines, and thrive on challenges at the intersection of hardware and software.

As a dual-use platform, we serve top-tier commercial and defense customers, including the U.S. Navy, United States Air Force, Shield AI, and Anduril. We’re backed by Sequoia, General Catalyst, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, and Lightspeed Ventures. Our team draws experience from Space

X, Palantir, Anduril, Applied Intuition, and other leading companies — united by a common mission: enabling hardware engineers to push the boundaries of advanced technology with speed, safety, and precision.

In this pivotal role, you'll deliver Nominal’s vision of providing continuous testing to the industrial base, equipping engineers to deploy capability at scale, in the shortest time possible. You’ll be working across accounts ranging from large enterprises to innovative startups, selling a modern software platform to hardware organizations. It’ll be your role to demonstrate and communicate how our technology fits into their existing stack and helps them meet their critical testing outcomes.

You will also be counted on to shape the early sales team and its culture.

• Solution scoping & collaboration — Collaborate deeply with Sales, Mission, Product, and Engineering teams to understand customer requirements, scope feasible solutions, and align on technical feasibility.
• Customer discovery & advocacy — Gain holistic insight into customer pain points and feedback to understand and quantify ways Nominal can benefit, while also helping to refine Nominal’s roadmap and messaging.
• Technical pre‑sales excellence — Deliver persuasive, tailored demos, PoCs, and technical presentations, effectively communicating Nominal’s platform value to C‑level executives, systems architects, engineering leads, testing managers, and IT stakeholders.
• Customize & prototype — Design custom demo workflows, extensions, or integrations (e.g., data ingestion pipelines, automation scripts) that showcase how Nominal delivers real‑world impact across ambiguous or edge‑case scenarios.
• Strategic opportunities — Partner with Account Executives to build account plans, identify internal champions, and navigate complex buying processes—including IT, compliance, and financial stakeholders.
• Team enablement & knowledge sharing — Co‑create battle cards, talk tracks, and technical collateral. Mentor junior team members and support the evolution of Nominal’s pre‑sales methodology.

• Proven experience:
  
  5–10 years in technical pre‑sales, solutions engineering, or sales engineering roles at high‑growth enterprise software companies, ideally with exposure to aerospace, defense, or industrial customers. You’ve consistently partnered with Account Executives to close complex, multi‑stakeholder deals, and can point to examples where your technical guidance directly enabled customer adoption.
• Technical fluency — You’re deeply conversant in cloud infra and analytics tooling (AWS, Azure, Databricks, Snowflake, Influx, Grafana) and can speak confidently with engineers in hardware or systems domains.
• Coding & data proficiency – You have expertise in coding with SQL, Python, and Pandas, as well as familiarity with Spark, Arrow, Kafka, Beam, and Flink.
• Solution‑selling mastery — You’ve successfully supported sales of technical platforms—ideally (but not necessary) in aerospace, defense, industrial automation, or manufacturing—and know how to integrate technical messaging into a compelling narrative.
• Collaborative & customer‑obsessed — You thrive when aligning cross‑functionally and building trust with customers and internal stakeholders alike.
• Adaptability & ownership — You flourish in dynamic,…