Nominal is the data supply chain platform for hardware engineering. It connects every stage of development, from first instrumentation through test campaigns, qualification, and live operations, so engineers can ingest, manage, and analyze massive volumes of telemetry, from cars to rockets to energy systems, in one collaborative environment.
Leo Galindo-Frias is a Software Engineer at Nominal, leading their developer infrastructure team. We spoke with Leo about how Depot helps Nominal maintain the deployment speed their customers depend on, especially as AI-driven development accelerates the pace.
The challenge
"Our release process is designed to ensure quality across multiple deployment targets, which makes efficient build times especially important to maintaining fast delivery to customers."
What makes Nominal's engineering challenge unusual is their deployment story. They ship to multi-tenant cloud, air-gapped environments, and on-prem installations, each with its own release process. A delay at the CI stage doesn't just slow down one deployment. It cascades through every downstream target.
Before optimization, Nominal's builds were routinely taking 15 minutes. For a team that deploys frequently and needs fast mean-time-to-recovery on customer-facing issues, those minutes matter, and they multiply. When CI takes 15 minutes, and the image build adds another few, and the GitOps deploy adds more, a single fix can take half an hour or longer to reach customers.
The pressure has only intensified as AI coding tools have driven up PR volume across the team. "We definitely feel that with the amount of PRs increasing, the amount of validation loops, it's been even more important to shift this left as much as possible," Leo said.
Nominal needed CI that could keep up. Fast builds, reliable runners, and caching that worked across the range of languages and build tools in their stack.
The solution
"Depot is a company that has delivered so many amazing product lines and has had very close collaboration with Nominal. The ergonomics are just so simple."
The criteria for selecting a CI partner were clear: Nominal wanted a company focused on CI/CD pipeline speed, with competitive pricing, and above all the best caching support available. "Depot hit all three," Leo said.
Caching is the thread that runs through everything. "A bad day is when we don't have good caching," Leo told us. "Honestly, that's probably the biggest thing with Depot. The caching support is just massive. And it's agnostic to whatever language or build tool we use."
At one point, an engineer opened a PR to add caching for a specific GitHub Action, only to close it after realizing Depot was already handling it. "We were trying to optimize something, but then we realized Depot had already done that for us," Leo said.
The speed gains add up across Nominal's workflows. The team uses Depot GitHub Actions runners, remote container builds, and Depot Cache across their backend and frontend services, as well as cross-platform testing for their Connect product line across Windows, macOS, and Linux.
The key benefits include:
- Language-agnostic caching: Depot Cache works across Nominal's polyglot stack, including Rust, Java, and TypeScript, without requiring per-language configuration or setup.
- Cross-platform concurrency: Nominal validates their Connect product across Windows, macOS, and Linux without waiting in queue, fanning out testing matrices with confidence.
- Hands-on support: Depot's team responds fast and works closely with Nominal on optimization. Leo recalls getting a response within seven minutes on a specific issue.
- Built-in analytics: Depot's observability features give Leo's team visibility into CPU usage, memory consumption, and build logs, useful for debugging and for making the case for infrastructure investments internally.
Nominal cut Docker build times from 12 minutes to 4 minutes across three services built in parallel, a 3x improvement. The team got there by sharding tests and selectively running them based on changed files, with Depot's remote container builds and shared cache handling the rest.
For Leo, much of Depot's value comes from how little his team has to think about it. "Usually you don't even have to worry about adding an API key or a specific setup," he said. "It's there already within the toolchain."
The measurable impact
"It's definitely a huge reputational advantage to be able to recover quickly. This is one of the most important lines of defense when it comes to our stability."
Depot's impact shows up across Nominal's build pipeline:
- 16x faster Windows linking times (8 min → 30 seconds)
- ~37% faster backend wall-clock times (9.2 min → 5.8 min over 10 months)
- Full deployment to multi-tenant in ~10 minutes from merge to live
The gains have shifted what Nominal's engineering team considers acceptable.
Leo walked us through the full deployment pipeline: CI, image building, and GitOps deploy. From merge to live in multi-tenant, the whole process takes roughly 10 minutes.
Every minute saved at the build stage compounds through all of that. The speed improvements aren't just about developer convenience. They're about how quickly Nominal can recover and respond for their customers.
Looking ahead
Nominal continues to expand their use of Depot across product lines, including cross-platform CI for their Connect product.