- Platform/infra/distributed systems; Terraform + AWS core
- High clock speed: competitions, academics, seen-greatness orgs
This is the core of the hiring push: engineers who continue building out the platform rather than building products. The work is a greenfield domain with no off-the-shelf solutions, building foundational infrastructure from scratch (indexing, versioning, authentication, execution, integration, code search at scale, sandboxing, tool calling, agent orchestration, deployment across many customer AWS accounts, RBAC, SSO, audit, data residency, on-prem and cloud support). Because these are critical enterprise systems that cannot be broken, the engineering bar on reliability, security, scalability, and observability is central. Nova works primarily in Python, JavaScript/React, and Go, with AWS and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) core. The profile ranges from a platform and distributed-systems engineer who has worked a lot with large-scale systems (AI experience helpful, not mandatory) to a pure infrastructure engineer who could be writing Terraform all day. Zero-to-one experience is a nice-to-have here, not close to a must-have, because this is less about speed to ship and more about doing it correctly and answering customer questions with full confidence.
Development at Nova is extremely AI-driven. From early on, they want people forming opinions on their dev workflow and pushing the team forward on developer experience, because with a small team, getting developers from 3x to 4x more productive is where an engineer earns more value than they cost. The 30-day shape is exploration: solve issues, contribute to the codebase, learn the product, and ideally work on internal tooling and DX (lower-stakes than touching customer infrastructure). By about 60 days, a good fit starts owning large pieces (code search infrastructure, deployment pipeline) and not just maintaining but improving them.
What You’ll Own
- Core platform and infrastructure: IaC (primarily AWS), reliability, scalability, security posture, and core platform capabilities
- Foundational systems the agent relies on: code search at scale, authentication, sandboxing, tool calling, orchestration
- Enterprise deployment: automated deploys across many customer AWS accounts, RBAC, SSO, audit, data residency, cloud and on-prem
- Connectivity between Nova and customer environments (networking, VPNs, firewall rules, routing), with customer IT/network teams
- Compliance posture (ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type 2) where the seat leans security/compliance
- Driving the team’s AI-native developer experience forward
Requirements
- Strong platform / backend / distributed-systems engineering, or deep infrastructure/DevOps/security engineering
- Hands-on Terraform in production; strong AWS (VPC, networking, VPNs, IAM, compute); solid networking fundamentals
- CI/CD (GitHub Actions or similar); Python / JavaScript-React / Go
- First-principles problem solver: can take a novel, unintuitive problem and work it out, not just speak well about what they already know
- Compliance familiarity (SOC 2, ISO 27001) a plus for the security/compliance-leaning seat; AI/LLM experience helpful, not required
Signal
- Seen greatness / high talent density: time at a known high-talent-density org (his examples: Addepar in the earlier days, Ramp in any period, Uber around 2016)
- Very high clock speed: clearly very intelligent with early signs of excellence (strong school and academic record; competition results like a high Codeforces rank). Closer to a requirement for this infra role.
- Early success / resourcefulness: already financially independent or “retired” and chooses to work anyway, or shared in a clearly successful company
- High slope, earlier-career profile with exceptional capability that has not yet been fully recognized (easier to bring on and a better motivation signal)
Anti-signals (Sam)
- In big tech too long (roughly 7 to 10 years): likely conformed, and “why did they not leave earlier”
- Around startups for a very long time (about 10 years, founder or employee) with no signs of success
- Sounds credible only on familiar ground and cannot reason through a new problem (automatic no at work trial)
Who Will Thrive Here
- A platform or infrastructure engineer who has seen a high bar up close and wants to set one on a greenfield problem
- Someone who reasons from first principles on unintuitive problems rather than leaning on prior knowledge
- A high-clock-speed, earlier-career engineer who has shown exceptional capability and wants real ownership fast
- Someone who treats AI-native developer experience as their own problem to push forward
- A builder who, within months, brings the ideas rather than waiting for a defined ticket