Production Engineer

What You’ll Do

• Drive reliability and observability improvements across large-scale distributed systems.
• Serve as a force multiplier across all engineering teams by reducing downtime, improving tooling, and freeing up senior engineers from firefighting.
• Own and evolve our incident review process, leading postmortems, and embedding learnings into tools, practices, and culture across the company.
• Collaborate with teams to improve release hygiene, including: Automating release gating (e.g., ensuring code bakes in staging for appropriate windows), preventing code from stagnating in staging environments, and implementing pre-prod automated test pipelines to catch issues early.
• Build and maintain Nominal’s gRPC middleware to ensure safe, observable, and performant service communication.
• Improve alerting, debugging, and monitoring to ensure production health and rapid root cause analysis.

Who You Are

You have 7+ years of experience in software engineering with a strong focus on production systems and distributed architectures. You thrive in high-leverage roles that improve how everyone else builds, ships, and fixes software. You’ve led or played a significant role in incident response, building systems, and culture around continuous improvement. You’re excited by complexity, not afraid of it, and you’re deeply motivated to make systems safer and teams faster.

Skills that supercharge us

• Experience working on distributed systems at scale.
• Hands-on experience with Kafka/Redpanda, PostgreSQL or other SQL databases, MongoDB/NoSQL databases, Clickhouse or other OLAP databases.
• Deep understanding of release automation, CI/CD, and code lifecycle management.
• Familiarity with gRPC and experience building shared infrastructure components like middleware.
• A systems mindset—you understand the ripple effects of a single bug and know how to design to prevent them.

Compensation

The base pay range for this role is $130,000 – $230,000 per year.