As a Product Designer, you will lead the design lifecycle for mission-critical features, focusing on human-machine interface design, establishing design systems, and collaborating with teams to enhance user experiences in advanced hardware systems.
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
The world's most consequential hardware (spacecraft, autonomous vehicles, defense systems, next-generation energy infrastructure) still runs on software that looks and feels a generation behind. At Nominal, we think the interfaces engineers use to command, monitor, and understand these systems should be as sophisticated as the hardware itself. As a Product Designer, you'll define what that looks like.
You'll work at the intersection of design and engineering, embedded with the team building the product. Your focus: rethinking HMI (human-machine interface) design for complex, high-rate systems. That means turning dense operational workflows into experiences that are immediate, legible, and trustworthy under pressure.
You'll be establishing the visual language and interaction principles for a category that doesn't have a modern standard yet. The patterns you set here will shape how an entire industry builds and operates critical systems for years to come.
🤔 What You'll Do:
- Lead the design lifecycle for mission-critical features and end-to-end workflows, from initial concept through to implementation.
- Design novel interactions that extend the capabilities of human-to-machine interfaces.
- Build and evolve a design system that solves immediate product needs while establishing durable foundations, codifying the visual language, component behaviors, and interaction conventions that the rest of the platform is built from.
- Define the visual and interaction principles that govern how Nominal's interfaces communicate system state, ensuring that critical information like alarms, faults, and operational status is immediately legible and unambiguous across contexts.
- Develop guidelines and patterns for information-dense environments where users are making time-sensitive decisions, accounting for real-world constraints like sustained attention, environmental variability, and diverse display conditions.
- Understand and bring clarity to technical topics using concrete design outputs: diagrams, data visualizations, layout, typography, interactions, and the like.
- Collaborate closely with our customers to synthesize feedback and drive high-quality, impactful design solutions.
- Contribute strategically to the product and design direction, making pivotal decisions that influence the future of Nominal's platform.
- Use storytelling and design thinking to bring stakeholders together, aligning them with your vision and process.
- Maintain a relentless focus on craft, constantly seeking to elevate the user experience by incorporating novel design solutions.
🔍 We're looking for someone with
- A minimum of 5+ years of experience as a designer for software development, with a strong emphasis on visual and interaction design.
- Expertise in Figma, with a strong foundation in prototyping, testing, and implementation.
- Experience building, scaling, or contributing to a design system, including defining tokens, components, patterns, and documentation that other designers and engineers build from.
- Comfort using AI tools to accelerate your workflow, whether that's generating and testing ideas faster, building prototypes, or exploring a wider range of solutions before committing to a direction.
- The ability to adapt to technical constraints in creative ways using your knowledge of web technologies.
- An exceptional portfolio showcasing expertise in creating multimodal experiences.
- A keen ability to articulate the rationale, process, and impact behind your design decisions.
- A versatile skill set that does not require prior hardware experience but is capable of navigating highly technical environments, including aerospace, defense, and advanced energy applications.
- An enthusiastic approach to problem-solving in complex scenarios, with a willingness to engage in customer immersion activities and on-site visits.
- A background or experience in front-end software engineering is a big plus.
🔍 Nice to Have:
- Familiarity with human factors principles or industry standards for interface design in safety-critical domains (e.g., ISA-101, MIL-STD-1472, WCAG 2.1).
- An understanding of how people process visual information under load: color perception, attention, cognitive workload, and how that should inform interface decisions.
- Experience designing for environments where the cost of misreading an interface is high: aerospace, defense, energy, industrial automation, or similar.
- A point of view on how to balance information density with clarity. You've thought about how to show a lot without overwhelming a user.
- Experience running or applying usability research in contexts where performance and response time matter.
✨ 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.
Top Skills
Ai Tools
Figma
Web Technologies
Nominal Austin, Texas, USA Office
Austin, TX, United States
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