Founder's Office Internship at Nova AI | Hyderabad

About the job

About the job

Founder’s Office Intern — Nova

Location: Hyderabad (in-person, not remote)

Duration: 3-month training period → full-time conversion on successful completion

Reports to: Founder & CEO

What Nova is

We’re building AIRA — an execution intelligence layer that sits inside Slack and Microsoft Teams and catches communication breakdowns in engineering and product teams before they turn into missed deadlines or burned-out people. Most tools either track work (Jira) or track happiness (HR surveys). Nobody connects the two. We do.

We’re a 6-person, bootstrapped, pre-seed team. We have a working prototype, paying-customer conversations in motion, and a spot in the Google for Startups India Hub. We’re not a feature factory and we’re not a lifestyle business — we’re trying to build something category-defining, fast.

What this role actually is

This isn’t a coffee-and-calendars internship. You’ll sit next to the founder and get pulled into whatever the company needs that week — which, at this stage, is almost everything:

• Investor pipeline — researching angels, prepping personalized materials, tracking outreach
• Hiring — screening candidates, drafting JDs, managing the funnel
• Product — sitting in on AIRA design discussions, helping document the intervention model and roadmap
• Ops — HR documentation, vendor coordination, the unglamorous admin that keeps a startup running
• General founder leverage — anything that’s high-priority and doesn’t yet have an owner

You will context-switch constantly. You will be handed half-finished thinking and asked to take it somewhere useful. You will see why decisions get made, not just what the decision was.

Who this is for

• Based in Hyderabad, available to work in-person
• Sharp writer — we screen on writing before we ever get on a call
• Comfortable with ambiguity; can take a vague instruction and turn it into a finished output without ten clarifying questions
• Genuinely curious about how an early-stage company is actually built, not just interested in the “startup” label

Skills you’ll need to survive here

• Bias to action. We’d rather you ship an imperfect first draft than ask for permission to start.
• Written clarity. Most of what we do is written — pitch decks, JDs, investor notes. If you can’t write tightly, this role will be hard.
• Self-direction under ambiguity. Nobody will hand you a fully scoped task most days. You’ll need to figure out what “done” looks like.
• Comfort with context-switching. Investor deck in the morning, candidate screening at noon, product doc in the afternoon. If you need long uninterrupted blocks to function, this isn’t the right environment.
• Thick skin on feedback. We correct fast and directly. It’s not personal — it’s the only way to move at this speed.
• Discretion. You’ll see investor terms, candidate feedback, and product strategy before almost anyone else. We need to trust you with that.

What you should not expect

• Defined hours, a fixed playbook, or a manager who tells you exactly what to do each day
• Stability — priorities will shift mid-week, sometimes mid-day
• A large stipend during the 3-month period (we’ll be upfront about numbers in the first conversation) — what you’re trading time for here is access and acceleration, not cash

If that trade-off doesn’t work for you right now, this probably isn’t the right fit — and that’s fine. We’d rather you self-select out than join and find out three weeks in.

What happens if it works

At the end of 3 months, if it’s a mutual fit, this converts to a full-time role with real ownership — not “intern with a new title,” but an actual seat in a small team building something from scratch. Early people at a company like this end up with outsized influence on what it becomes.

Our culture, briefly

We’re direct. We say what we mean, correct fast, and don’t sugarcoat. We care about execution speed and specificity over polish-for-polish’s-sake. We’re trying to build a company that’s genuinely useful to the teams using it — not a feature checklist, not hype. If you want a place where your work is visible, your mistakes are visible, and your growth curve is steep, this is that place.

To apply: Email [email protected] with a short note on why this role specifically (not “startups” generally), and one example of something you built, wrote, or fixed under ambiguous instructions.