Senior Technical Recruiter
People & HR, IT · Full-time
Texas, USA · Los Angeles, CA, USA · New York, NY, USA · Austin, QC, Canada
USD 150k-180k / year
Posted on Sep 18, 2026
Senior Technical Recruiter
New York, NY • Los Angeles, CA • Austin, TX
Talent
In office
Full-time
About 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 us
- Experience 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.
Compensation
The base pay range for this role is $150,000 – $180,000 per year.
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This position requires access to information and technology that is subject to U.S. export controls. Your responses to the questions below will be used solely to determine your eligibility under U.S. law to receive information and materials subject to U.S. export controls. Are you any of the following “protected individual(s)” as defined in the Immigration and Naturalization Act, 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3)? *
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Will you require sponsorship from Nominal for employment now or in the future? (e.g, OPT, H1B visa)? *
Clearance Eligibility - Do you presently hold an active U.S. security clearance, or are you eligible to obtain and maintain a U.S. security clearance? *
If you have held a U.S. security clearance in the past, what clearance level have you held? *
Are you a Type 1 or Type 2 recruiter? Why? Share one specific example that clearly demonstrates this. *
Why are you interested Nominal? We want to know why you want to work here and what skills you hope to develop in this role - a great answer is around 100 words max. *
Are you willing to work in-office 5x/week? *
Have you recruited at an early-stage startup before (0–5 years in)? Are you energized by owning the full hiring journey—from first message to a candidate’s first day? *
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To comply with government reporting requirements, we invite candidates to participate in the self-identification survey below. Your completion of this form is entirely optional, and your decision will neither influence the hiring process nor any subsequent stages. Any information you choose to share will be kept confidential and stored in a secure file. As outlined in our Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we uphold a commitment to non-discrimination based on any protected group status specified in applicable laws.
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VEVRAA requires Government contractors to take affirmative action to employ and advance in employment protected veterans. To help us measure the effectiveness of our outreach and recruitment efforts of veterans, we are asking you to tell us if you are a veteran covered by VEVRAA. If you believe that you belong to any of the following categories of protected veterans, please indicate by making the appropriate selection.
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A veteran who served on active duty in the U.S. military and is entitled to disability compensation (or who but for the receipt of military retired pay would be entitled to disability compensation) under laws administered by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, or was discharged or released from active duty because of a service-connected disabilityRecently separated veteran
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Req ID: R131