Lead Agentic Engineer.

About Novastart.

Novastart is an operating system whose desktop is an infinite canvas. Every app is a window with a place; you zoom out to see everything and zoom in to work; teammates click and type in your windows from their own machines; and AI agents get a cursor of their own. It ships today as Novastart OS for PCs and as an app for Windows and Intel Macs. We are a small team in Manhattan Beach, California, and we think the desktop is the most interesting unsolved surface in computing.

This is the beginning. The product is in people's hands, the first users are on it, and almost every question about what an agent on a computer should be is still open. Nobody joining now inherits a finished system. You define one, with the founder, and the work you ship this year is what the company will be known for. If you have been waiting for the moment when your judgement shapes the whole product rather than one corner of it, this is that moment.

The role.

Agents on Novastart are not a chat box. They have a mouse and a keyboard of their own, work in the real UI of real apps, run in four modes (Agent, Plan, Ask and Observe), recruit helpers for big jobs, and every run is logged and checked by an independent verifier before it counts as done. Today that runtime runs on OpenAI's computer-use models. Your job is to take it from a working system to the reason people install Novastart: more capable, more reliable, faster, and always something the person at the desk can watch, pause and take back. You will be the first engineer whose whole job is the agents, you will report directly to the founder, and you will set the standard the rest of the agent team is hired against. Early means wide: some weeks you will be deep in the runtime, and some weeks you will be watching a new user's first run and fixing what you saw before the day is out.

What you will do.

• Own the agent runtime end to end: planning, tool use, the helper team, the verifier and the run log.
• Make agents reliable in real apps: measure where they fail, build the evaluations, fix the long tail.
• Grow the Open Virtual Input SDK in Python, JavaScript and Rust, so others can build agents that get their own cursor on Novastart.
• Decide with the founder what agents should do next, then build it and put it in front of users.
• Keep the person in charge: pause, steer, take a window back and see everything an agent did.

Must have.

• Five or more years building production software, including systems you owned once they were live.
• Hands-on experience building agents or automation on large language models: tool use, planning, evaluation, and the failure modes you learned the hard way.
• Strong Python. Comfortable in TypeScript or JavaScript.
• Fluent on Linux: processes, input, windows and the desktop stack.
• You design for the person watching. Oversight, logs and undo are features to you, not afterthoughts.
• Clear writing, fast iteration, and the appetite for an early startup: wide scope, quick decisions, and your name on the result.

Nice to have.

• Rust, and any time spent inside a Wayland compositor or another windowing system.
• Work with computer-use or vision models, or with systems where several agents work at once.
• WebRTC, CRDTs or other real-time collaboration plumbing.
• A desktop app you shipped, or an open source project you maintained.
• Experience turning an ambitious prototype into something people rely on every day.

How we work.

A small team with real ownership: decisions get written down, code lands on real machines, and your judgement shapes the product every week. The company is in Manhattan Beach, California. Remote is possible for the right person.

How to apply.

Email support@novastart.com with "Lead Agentic Engineer" in the subject line. Send your resume or a link to your work, and a few lines on an agent or system you built and what you learned from it. We read every application.

Equal opportunity.

Novastart is an equal opportunity employer. We hire on skill and drive, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, age or any other characteristic protected by law. If you need an accommodation at any step of the process, tell us in your email and we will arrange it.