Enterprise·Series A·New York, New York

Senior Product Engineer

at Nova — Enterprise

Location

New York, New York

Salary

$200,000 - $400,000

Type

Full-Time

TL;DR

Real zero-to-one success; founder background ideal
products end-to-end; strong product taste + UI

About Nova

Nova is building the most powerful AI agent platform for SAP teams. SAP is the most important enterprise software system in the world, running critical business processes (finance, procurement, supply chain, manufacturing, HR, customer service) for over 90% of the Fortune 500 and the Global 2000. It is also old, clunky, expensive, and time-consuming to maintain, with its own programming language and proprietary object model, so modern tools like Claude Code and Codex do not work on it. Enterprises spend roughly $200 billion a year on SAP services (consultants and in-house), which is around the scale of Google’s search revenue. Nova builds the dedicated platform that brings frontier intelligence to the teams working with SAP, giving them the same leverage everyone else gets from modern AI coding tools. Customers use Nova to 3x the productivity of their SAP teams: modernizing legacy code, redesigning processes, resolving production issues, and more. Nova is about 30 people, closed its Series A earlier this year, and has raised about $40M total (JD lists SAP.io, Accel, Conviction, and Chemistry). The founding team is the rare combination of Silicon Valley AI engineering and deep SAP expertise. Sam Yang (CEO) is a repeat entrepreneur whose prior company scaled to a few million users and a few million in revenue and profit (still growing and profitable). Emma (co-founder) is a former researcher at Google DeepMind and Facebook Research who previously started a company that raised about $10M. Professor Dr. Alexander Zeier (co-founder, chief scientist) co-invented SAP HANA and was global CTO for Accenture’s SAP business group (the largest SAP consultant, about $15B a year in SAP consulting). Justin Kershaw (Chief Customer Officer) was the former CIO at Cargill, the largest private US company by revenue, with one of the most complex SAP systems in the world.

novaintelligence.com

Website

Series A • 11 – 50

Stage & size

Enterprise

Industry

2024

Founded

About This Role

This seat is for a product engineer who owns products end to end on top of Nova’s platform. Sam holds a very high bar here, because in his view everyone can build a product now, so the differentiator is someone who has gone zero to one with real success. The strongest shape is a founder or someone who has built and shipped things that worked (one person on the team built and sold three companies and was effectively retired before joining). This person needs strong product sense, can figure out the UI, and can own products end to end as Nova builds more and more on top of the platform. The clock-speed/competition bar matters a bit less here than for the infra role; early success and a track record of building successful things matter more, because they translate most directly into end-to-end product ownership.

The 30-day shape is exploration and contribution; by 60 days, ownership of meaningful pieces; by six months, bringing product ideas directly. Sam’s reasoning: there is no time for endless product-planning meetings, and because Nova takes a platform approach, building products on top is fast, so the value is in coming up with the right ideas and thinking through problems well, more than in raw execution (execution is increasingly solved). Development is extremely AI-native, and the same “bring the ideas, hunt down the problems yourself” trajectory applies.

What You’ll Own

Products on top of the Nova platform, end to end: backend services, integrations with the enterprise stack, and the client applications customers use daily
Agent reliability work: evaluation frameworks and feedback loops that improve agent performance on real customer workloads, instrumenting failures and turning customer scenarios into reproducible tests
Product direction: within months, generating and driving product ideas, not just executing assigned ones

Requirements

Strong software engineer who ships production systems end to end (Python, JavaScript/React, Go)
Real zero-to-one track record with some success; founder background ideal
Strong product sense; can figure out UI and own a product end to end
Solid cloud/infra chops (AWS familiarity, comfortable with IaC); informed opinions on agent design and frontier models (Claude Code, Cursor, Cline, etc.)
Comfortable with ambiguity: takes an ill-defined problem and ships without being told how
First-principles problem solver (same decisive work-trial trait)

Who Will Thrive Here

A founder or ex-founder who has shipped successful products zero to one and wants to own product surface end to end
Someone with real product taste who can define and build without planning overhead
A resourceful builder who, within months, brings the product ideas
Someone opinionated on agents and frontier models who has tuned their own AI-native workflow

Job Details

Experience

3-8 Years

Salary

$200,000 - $400,000

Equity

0.1% - 0.5%

Visa Sponsorship

Yes

Employment Type

Full-Time

Work Arrangement

In office

Work Intensity

9-9-5

Benefits & Perks

Full Health

Dental

Vision

Standard Package Via Rippling

Green Flags

Built and shipped products that succeeded (or sold companies)

Already successful/resourceful and chooses to work anyway

Clear product taste plus the engineering to own it end to end

Red Flags

Can build a generic product but no evidence anything succeeded

7 to 10 years in big tech, or ~10 years around startups with nothing that worked

Needs defined specs; no product initiative

Candidate scorecard

· 3 criteria

Real zero-to-one success; founder background ideal

Strong end-to-end product engineering (backend + can figure out UI)

Product sense and the ability to generate ideas, not just execute