Senior Technical Recruiter
nominalAustin (TX)
About the role
Technical Recruiter at Nominal Nominal is building the connected test and operations platform powering the world's most advanced hardware systems, from spacecraft and autonomous vehicles to next-generation defense programs. Our platform gives hardware engineering teams a single place to ingest data, analyze performance, automate test execution, and collaborate across every phase of development, so they can move faster without sacrificing safety or precision. We're a fast-moving team that owns problems end-to-end, works across disciplines, and thrives at the intersection of hardware and software. We serve top-tier commercial and defense customers, from autonomy leaders like Anduril and Shield AI to next-generation aerospace teams like Hermeus and REGENT, and performance engineering teams like Pratt Miller Motorsports, alongside mission partners within the U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force on programs where failure isn't an option. We're backed by Sequoia, General Catalyst, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, and Lightspeed. Our team draws from SpaceX, Palantir, Anduril, Applied Intuition, and other leading companies, united by a common mission: giving hardware engineers the tools to build the future with speed, safety, and confidence. As a Technical Recruiter at Nominal, you'll own recruiting for some of the most technically complex and important roles across our Engineering and Product organizations. This is a role for a recruiter who can learn technical domains quickly, develop strong opinions about talent, and operate as a true partner to technical leaders. You won't need to be an engineer, but you should be able to go deep enough to understand why one engineer is meaningfully different from another—and explain that distinction back to the hiring team. You'll own searches end-to-end while helping us build stronger, more repeatable ways to identify and assess exceptional technical talent as Nominal scales.
What You'll Do:
- Own complex technical searches
- Lead full-cycle recruiting across Software Engineering, Product, Infrastructure, AI, and other highly technical areas as our organization evolves.
- Build targeted search strategies and market maps for roles where the right candidates may come from a narrow or highly competitive talent pool.
- Develop and maintain relationships with exceptional technical talent, including candidates who may not be actively looking.
- Own the candidate relationship from first outreach through offer and close.
- Turn technical problems into recruiting strategies
- Partner directly with engineering and product leaders to deeply understand the problems their teams are solving and the capabilities required to solve them.
- Take raw or ambiguous hiring needs and turn them into clear role definitions, candidate profiles, sourcing strategies, and compelling job descriptions.
- Learn unfamiliar technical concepts quickly enough to distinguish meaningful experience from surface-level keyword matches.
- Bring market signal back to hiring teams and confidently challenge or recalibrate a profile when the candidate market tells us something different.
- Build how we assess technical talent
- Translate role requirements into clear assessment criteria and structured interview strategies.
- Partner with hiring managers to define the signals we need from each stage of the interview process and ensure our interviews actually assess for them.
- Develop a strong point of view on candidate quality rather than relying solely on hiring managers to determine fit.
- Use what we learn from searches, interviews, and hires to continuously sharpen our understanding of what great looks like.
- Build for scale
- Balance hands-on recruiting execution with improving the systems, processes, and infrastructure behind technical hiring.
- Identify opportunities to improve sourcing, interviewer calibration, candidate experience, recruiting operations, and talent intelligence.
- Help Nominal build a technical recruiting function capable of maintaining an exceptionally high talent bar as our engineering organization grows.
Who You Are:
- You have 4+ years of technical recruiting experience in startups or other high-performance technology environments.
- You have significant experience recruiting software engineers and other highly technical profiles and can speak credibly about the differences between engineering backgrounds, domains, and skill sets.
- You learn technical concepts quickly and know how to ask the questions necessary to understand a role beyond the job description.
- You can take an ambiguous hiring need and independently turn it into a clear candidate profile, search strategy, and assessment plan.
- You have strong sourcing instincts and an existing network within technical talent markets that you can continue to build from.
- You're comfortable forming a point of view, using market data to challenge assumptions, and pushing back thoughtfully with hiring managers.
- You're an excellent full-cycle recruiter who can source, assess, manage complex processes, negotiate, and close.
- You operate with high agency and don't need a perfectly defined process or profile before you can start making progress.
- You build credibility quickly with highly technical hiring managers and candidates through preparation, curiosity, and sound judgment.
- Skills that supercharge usExperience recruiting engineers at high-bar software, infrastructure, AI, developer tools, data, or technically complex product companies.
- Experience recruiting through a period of significant engineering organization growth.
- Experience at a venture-backed startup or agency supporting high-growth technology companies.
- A strong existing network of software engineering and technical talent.
- Experience building or materially improving technical interview processes, scorecards, or assessment strategies.
- Experience recruiting across multiple technical domains rather than specializing exclusively in a single profile.
- Experience explaining and closing candidates on startup compensation and equity.
- Familiarity with hardware, aerospace, defense, robotics, developer infrastructure, data-intensive software, or other technically complex domains.
- Benefits/Perks 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance
- Unlimited PTO and sick leave
- Free lunch, snacks, and coffee
- Professional Development Stipend
- In-office hardware lab with a $250 project 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.
Before you apply
Applying takes about a minute. These four things decide how fast it moves after that.
Your profile is current
It's what we read first. Occupations, seniority and locations matter more than a long history.
Two examples you can talk through
Not a portfolio — just two pieces of work where you can explain the decisions and what you'd change.
A number in mind
What you're on now and what would make you move. We negotiate better when we know both.
Your notice period
Employers plan around it, and it's the question that stalls offers most often.
Once you apply, someone reads it and calls you before anything reaches the employer — usually within two working days.