The Comms & Content Lead at Nominal will manage brand narrative, customer storytelling, social media presence, PR, and talent branding, focusing on defense and engineering sectors.
About Nominal
Nominal builds connected test and operations infrastructure for teams who build, test, and operate the most consequential machines on Earth. Think: nuclear reactors, satellites, jets, autonomous vehicles, defense systems, manufacturing lines. Our customers are engineering teams that Nominal to move faster, catch problems earlier, and ship hardware that works.
We're backed by Sequoia, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, and General Catalyst. We have raised $182 million to date, most recently at a $1 billion valuation. The company is 135 people, growing fast, and at the forefront of defining how hardware engineering teams work for the next decade.
This person owns how the world perceives Nominal and how the best people in the world decide to come work here. You report directly to a co-founder who is obsessed with the company’s narrative and leads the team in charge of marketing, comms, and overall ~storytelling~.
Nominal's marketing org has three pillars: Growth owns pipeline and field. Product Marketing owns positioning. Comms & Content owns perception, reputation, and external signal. This is the third pillar. You’re helping build it from the ground up.
The surface area is enormous. We have customers building autonomous maritime platforms, hypersonic vehicles, and space launch systems who are opening their doors and asking us to tell their stories. We're the official software partner for Corvette Racing program. We're winning federal contracts that reshape how the Department of Defense manages test and operations across trillion dollars of program and tens of thousands of employees. The raw material for world-class storytelling is everywhere. We need someone to do it justice alongside our brand and design team.
✨ What You'll do
- Own the narrative. Brand voice, messaging guardrails, and the quality bar for everything external. You decide what we say, how we say it, and what we don't.
- Tell customer stories. Our customers are the heroes. You'll build relationships with engineering teams at defense primes, aerospace startups, and robotics companies, then turn what they're doing with Nominal into stories that travel. Case studies, editorial, documentary-style video, technical essays. The format matters less than the instinct for what's interesting.
- Build the federal and defense narrative. Nominal is becoming critical infrastructure for national security programs. You'll help us tell that story to the right audiences, navigate ITAR and classification sensitivities with care, and turn contract wins and partnership announcements into moments that compound.
- Run social. You own Nominal's presence on LinkedIn, X, and wherever the conversation is happening. Day-to-day posting, audience building, engagement strategy. You're not setting a calendar for someone else to execute. You're the one building the following.
- Amplify leadership. Our founders and senior leaders already think and write publicly about engineering culture, defense modernization, and what it takes to build resilient things. They have no qualms about using their voices. You're their editor and sparring partner. You help our CEO, co-founders, and other leaders sound like themselves, but sharper and more visible.
- Own PR and media. Strategic, not reactive. You'll build relationships with the reporters and independent media voices who matter. You know when to pitch and when to stay quiet. You turn fundraises, partnerships, and wins into moments that build on each other.
- Build the talent brand. We compete with the likes of Anthropic, Ramp, and Cursor for talent. You make ambitious people think: I need to be there. Not with platitudes about culture. With real stories about real work in the real world that inspire grounded and obsessed engineers and operators to choose Nominal.
We're open on background. What matters is the combination of instinct, intensity, and, yes, craft.
Some example profiles that would make us lean in:
- You're at a venture firm writing the best memos, articles, and X posts, and you're ready to build something instead of advise on it.
- You've been doing comms at a company in the hardware domain, and you want to own the end-to-end narrative at an earlier stage.
- You're a journalist or editor tired of covering the story and ready to be inside one.
- You're at an agency and you've been the secret weapon behind campaigns for companies you believe in more than your own employer.
- Or you're someone we haven't described, but you read this and thought: finally.
Non-negotiables:
- Writing. Your writing has to be exceptional. Not "good for corporate." Clear, vivid, with a point of view. We'll know within 500 words.
- Instinct. You know what's interesting before anyone tells you. You have the spidey sense. You see the two-minute clip inside the 45-minute conversation. You know which story to tell and which to kill.
- Speed and taste. You can produce something great under pressure, not just in ideal conditions. You edit ruthlessly. You ship.
- Fluency in the conversation. You follow hardware, engineering, and defense tech Twitter/X, the Substacks and podcasts shaping how people think about hardware, industrial policy, and national security. You've lost hours to YouTube teardowns and Reddit threads about how things work. You probably think CrunchLabs is cool and used to think Mythbusters was cooler. You might know some of the people driving the discourse in our domain. You might be one of them. Either way, you understand where hardware engineering is heading and you have ideas about how Nominal shows up in it.
Send us something that shows us how you think (link to submit is below). A writing sample, a portfolio, a tear sheet, a thread. Whatever represents your best work and your instincts. We'll read every one.
Share an opinion about a way Nominal has showed up publicly, in the press or in social or other content, and tell us why you like it or what you would have done differently.
✨ 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 $120,000 – $230,000 per year.
Nominal Austin, Texas, USA Office
Austin, TX, United States
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