Careers Update
We're hiring.
Overview
Nova is small and bootstrapped, founded in 2025, building from Houston. We hire deliberately to extend what the team does best, not to fill an org chart. The team that ships the agentic-SRE platform is the same team that runs it; that constraint shapes who we look for.
- Engineers who own outcomes. Ownership beats specialisation in early-stage teams; the engineer who designs the feature is usually the same one who keeps it running.
- Operational depth. Real on-call experience, real incident response, real production scars. Marketing copy about reliability is not the same as having debugged it at 3am.
- Customer empathy. The team builds for engineers like themselves; we want hires who have been the on-call for the system they would be improving.
- Clear writing and direct, kind, ambitious culture. Code, docs, postmortems, customer email. Distance and async work amplify both clarity and confusion.
The approach
High signal, low ceremony. Real-work artefacts beat puzzle interviews; bounded timelines beat open-ended pipelines.
- Real-work signals. Code samples, incident postmortems, technical writing. We read what you have shipped before we book the next call.
- Founder-level pairing. Final-round candidates pair with a founder on a real problem from the current sprint, not a contrived puzzle.
- References that matter. Past managers and peers describe how you operate. Interviews catch a couple of hours; references catch the patterns.
- Decisive timeline and clear yes-or-no. Each round ends with a hire/no-hire signal; we avoid the slow-no that wastes a candidate's quarter.
Why this compounds
Hiring discipline compounds. Each good hire raises the bar for the next; culture either reinforces or erodes one decision at a time. We are early enough that every hire shapes the next ten.
- Bar-raising effect. The hires we make set the standard candidates we attract for the next role.
- Cultural reinforcement. Aligned hires keep the team direct and outcome-focused as we grow.
- Faster product velocity. A small, high-trust team ships more in a quarter than a larger fragmented one.
- Retention through ownership. Engineers who own outcomes stay because they can see the impact of their work in the product.
If you operate production systems, write clearly, and want to build the agentic SRE platform we're building, see the careers page. We hire deliberately; we hire for outcomes.