The Design Engineer will lead web and brand experiences, collaborating with Design, Marketing, and Engineering, ensuring high-quality and maintainable outputs while using AI tools for rapid prototyping.
About Nominal
Nominal is building the software infrastructure that powers 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 software systems in real time, and helps engineering teams 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 solving challenges at the intersection of hardware and software. As a dual-use platform, we're serving top-tier commercial and defense customers, including the U.S. Navy, United States Air Force, Shield AI, and Anduril.
We're backed by top-tier investors (Sequoia, General Catalyst, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, and Lightspeed Ventures) who share our mission to accelerate innovation in mission-critical systems. Our team brings experience from SpaceX, Palantir, Anduril, Applied Intuition, and other leading companies, united by a common goal: enabling hardware engineers to push the boundaries of advanced technology with speed, safety, and precision.
🚀 About the role
We’re looking for a Design Engineer with strong visual taste and the ability to ship. This role sits at the intersection of design and engineering, focused on making our web presence feel uniquely Nominal.
You’ll take projects from early concept through production, working closely with Design and Marketing to shape the narrative and the craft, and partnering with Engineering to ensure what we ship is maintainable and performant.
🤔 What You'll Do:
- Lead the design and implementation of web and brand experiences from concept through launch
- Define interaction, motion, and layout patterns that raise the quality bar across the entire site
- Translate brand direction, copy, and visual design into web-native experiences with a high level of polish
- Build prototypes and interactive explorations in code to quickly test and refine ideas
- Create reusable components and patterns that encode our visual language (typography, spacing, behavior)
- Ensure excellent accessibility, performance, and cross-browser behavior as part of the design standard
- Collaborate closely with Design, Marketing, and Engineering to align on intent and execution
- Use AI tools to accelerate exploration, prototype quickly, and iterate toward production-quality craft
🔍 We're looking for someone with
- A portfolio showcasing strong visual taste, interaction craft, and shipped web work
- Experience designing end-to-end websites, landing pages, or product storytelling surfaces
- Prior work on a brand, marketing, or growth team at a product company or studio/agency background shipping high-touch marketing sites
- Comfort moving fluidly between Figma (or equivalent) and code, even if AI-assisted
- Experience contributing to a design system (tokens, components, documentation)
- Strong communication skills and an ability to articulate design decisions and tradeoffs
🔍 Nice to Have:
- Experience with React and modern component-based UI development
- Comfort with Tailwind and component-level styling systems to achieve high polish quickly
- Familiarity with Shadcn (or similar primitives) and the ability to customize components with taste
- Experience with animation and interaction techniques (Framer Motion, Lottie, etc.)
- Interest in emerging creative tooling and rapid prototyping workflows
✨ 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 retreat
All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin.
ITAR Requirements
To conform to U.S. Government export regulations, applicant must be a (i) U.S. citizen or national, (ii) U.S. lawful, permanent resident (aka green card holder), (iii) Refugee under 8 U.S.C. § 1157, or (iv) Asylee under 8 U.S.C. § 1158, or be eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State. Learn more about the ITAR here.
CompensationThe base pay range for this role is $140,000 – $230,000 per year.
Nominal Austin, Texas, USA Office
Austin, TX, United States
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