UI/UX Design Intern — Nova (AIRA)

Location: Hyderabad (Fully in-office) Duration: 4-month paid internship → full-time conversion Stipend: ₹10,000–₹20,000/month | Post-conversion CTC: Up to ₹6 LPA Type: Full-time internship, in-office only

About Nova & AIRA

Nova (Totoro Technologies Pvt. Ltd.) is a pre-seed startup based in Hyderabad, selected for the Google for Startups India Hub at T-Hub. We're building AIRA — an execution intelligence layer that sits inside Slack, Google Workspace, and Microsoft Teams to catch team communication breakdowns before they turn into missed deadlines, misaligned work, or burned-out people.

Most tools track tasks. AIRA reads conversations — the clarification loops, the delayed replies, the late-night follow-ups — and tells you what's actually happening on a team before it becomes a delivery problem or a people problem. We're a 6-person team, bootstrapped, currently in active pilot conversations with a 15,000+ employee enterprise, and raising our pre-seed round. This is early. You'll be one of the first designers to shape how AIRA looks, feels, and behaves.

The design problem you're solving

AIRA's core design challenge isn't "make it pretty" — it's restraint. AIRA is built to be invisible ~70-80% of the time, surface a soft nudge ~15-25% of the time, and escalate to a manager in under 5% of cases. Getting that balance wrong in the UI — too loud, too naggy, too dashboard-y — kills the product. Get it right, and it feels like the product is quietly reading the room.

You'll be designing for

Inline surfaces — subtle suggestions inside Slack, Teams, and Gmail compose/reply flows that never feel like a bot interrupting a conversation

Manager dashboards — that reveal patterns and risk without ever feeling like surveillance (no individual call-outs, no "gotcha" metrics)





Enterprise trust — every screen has to answer an unspoken question from a nervous VP: "is this going to make my team feel watched?"

What you'll actually do

Design UI flows and components for AIRA's Slack, Teams, and Gmail integrations, and the manager dashboard

Translate abstract product logic (signal → interpretation → impact, intervention tiers, cooldown logic) into interfaces real humans will trust and use daily

Run quick research loops — talk to pilot users, observe how nudges land, iterate based on real reactions rather than assumptions

Build and maintain a lightweight design system as the product scales across three platforms

Work directly with the founder and engineering team — no layers, no sign-off chains, rapid iteration

Why UX matters this much here

Enterprise buyers don't forgive bad UX the way consumer users sometimes do — a clunky flow reads as "this vendor doesn't understand our world" and kills a deal in one demo. For AIRA specifically, UX is the trust layer: the same signal, shown the wrong way, feels like surveillance; shown the right way, feels like help. There is no feature that survives bad execution here. This role is not decoration on top of the product — it's core to whether enterprises adopt this at all.

What we're looking for

Strong fundamentals in UI/UX design — layout, typography, interaction patterns, basic design systems thinking

Genuine curiosity about behavior and psychology — you'll be designing for how people react to being nudged, not just how a screen looks





Comfort with ambiguity — specs will be incomplete, requirements will change as we learn from pilots A research-and-iterate mindset — you propose, test, get feedback, redo. Repeatedly. Without needing to be told twice.

Patience — enterprise design cycles are slower and more political than consumer ones; this isn't a "ship and forget" environment

Familiarity with Figma (or equivalent) at minimum; portfolio of real work (student projects, freelance, personal projects — anything that shows your thinking)

Before you apply — read this carefully

This is a 6-person, pre-seed, bootstrapped startup. There is no HR department, no onboarding deck, no fully-formed process for most things — you'll help build them. If you're looking for a structured, well-documented internship with a clear playbook handed to you on day one, this isn't it.

We're looking for someone who wants to be here for the long run — this internship is designed to convert into a full-time role, and we're investing in you accordingly. If you're doing this purely as a short resume line item, or you're not genuinely excited by early-stage startup chaos (ambiguity, fast pivots, wearing multiple hats, direct and unfiltered feedback), please don't apply — it won't be a good experience for either of us. If instead you want real ownership, direct access to the founder, and the chance to shape a product from near-zero, this is a rare seat.

Are you open to a fully in-office internship in Hyderabad for the full duration? (Y/N)

Are you looking for a long-term role, not just a short-term internship? (Y/N)

Are you comfortable working in an early-stage startup with high ambiguity and no fixed playbook? (Y/N)

Can you share a portfolio link with your application? (Y/N)

Nova [email protected] | novacommunicate.com

📌 UI/UX Design Intern — Nova (AIRA) (Hyderabad)
🏢 Crafter
📍 Hyderabad