Off Grid

Integrated Experience Engineer

Manchester workshop

• Full-time

Most trade-show tech is a TV on a stand. You'll build the other kind.

Our Experience Vaults are pre-built activations that tour inside road-legal structures: portrait studios, infinity mirror rooms, reflex trainers, SIM racing rigs. You're the person who makes them do things. Lights that respond, targets that score, motors that move. You sit exactly where the physical and technical worlds meet, and you're comfortable there.

What you'll do

• Design and build the interactive core of our Experience Vaults, from first prototype to touring asset
• Install and map LED systems: addressable strips, pixel mapping, lighting control
• Build custom physical interactions with Raspberry Pi and Arduino. Sensors in, motion and light out
• Spec, program and integrate stepper motors, linear actuators and robotics
• Make everything tour-proof. What you build gets packed in a truck, driven across the country, and switched on by someone who isn't you. It works first time, or it isn't finished
• Document wiring, firmware and failure modes so the tour crew can fault-find at 7am on a show floor

What you'll need

• Strong electrical engineering background. You can design a circuit, spec a power supply, and diagnose with a multimeter
• Hands-on fluency with microcontrollers (Arduino, ESP32) and single-board computers (Raspberry Pi)
• LED installation and mapping experience (WS2812/addressable, DMX or similar)
• Working knowledge of motion: stepper motors and drivers, actuators, basic robotics
• Enough programming to make it all talk. Python, C/C++, or whatever gets the job done cleanly
• The instinct to build things that survive a forklift, not just a demo

Useful, not required

• Show control experience (DMX/Art-Net, TouchDesigner, QLC+ or similar)
• Fabrication skills. You can mount your own work in birch and steel
• Interactive installations, museums, escape rooms, theme parks or live events on your CV

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Workshop Fabricator

Manchester workshop

• Full-time

The ply edge is our signature. You'll be cutting it.

Every Nova product is Baltic birch on a strict 24" grid, CNC-cut, hand-finished, with the edge left honest and exposed. Nothing hides behind laminate, which means nothing hides your work either. If that reads as pressure, this isn't the job. If it reads as the point, keep going.

What you'll do

• Run CNC production: CAM setup, nesting, tooling, cutting and finishing birch components
• Build fixtures, PODs and Vaults from cut parts: joinery, hardware insertion, assembly, QC
• Hand-finish edges and faces to a furniture standard
• Prototype new products alongside the design team and feed buildability notes back into the drawings
• Keep the workshop sharp: tooling, materials, extraction, the unglamorous things that make good work possible

What you'll need

• CNC router experience, including CAM (VCarve, Fusion 360 or similar), nesting and workholding
• Solid cabinetmaking or joinery fundamentals
• A finish-quality eye. Zero visible fasteners on customer-facing surfaces isn't a slogan here, it's a spec
• Comfort reading technical drawings and working to a dimensioned grid

Useful, not required

• Welding or metal fabrication (our structural spine is steel)
• Spray or hand-finishing experience
• Experience building things that get moved: events, film sets, retail, exhibitions

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Design Engineer

Manchester workshop

• Full-time

Every Nova product lives on a 24" grid. You'll design inside it, and make that constraint look like a choice.

This is design engineering, not concept art. Your models get cut the same week. Your renders go in front of clients. Your drawings go to the CNC without a phone call from the workshop, because they didn't need one.

What you'll do

• Design new fixtures, PODs and Vaults in Onshape: parametric, production-ready models
• Produce fabrication drawings the workshop can build from directly
• Make the tolerance, fixings and detailing decisions that keep a part reusable show after show
• Render product visuals for the website, sales decks and client proposals
• Configure client booths from the modular catalogue and prove they fit before anything is cut
• Work within the system's rules: 24" grid, 48" × 48" maximum part size, flat-pack everything, one 4mm hex key builds it all

What you'll need

• Fluency in Onshape, or deep parametric CAD experience (SolidWorks, Fusion) and the willingness to switch
• Rendering ability. You can take a model to a convincing visual (Blender, KeyShot, or in-CAD)
• Understanding of sheet-goods construction and joinery. You design for the CNC, not just the screen
• An architectural sensibility: proportion, restraint, and knowing when to stop

Useful, not required

• Exhibition, retail or furniture design background
• Design-for-manufacture or flat-pack experience
• Graphics awareness. Brandable zones are part of every product

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Install & Tour Crew

Manchester

• Touring
• Freelance

Everything Nova promises gets proven by you, on-site, before the doors open.

Our whole pitch is that the kit arrives, fits, and works. No measuring on site, no surprises. The design carries most of that. You carry the rest. This is skilled work for people who like early starts, tidy vans, and the specific satisfaction of a build that goes up exactly as drawn.

What you'll do

• Load, drive, deliver and install Nova booths and Vaults at events across the UK and Europe
• Assemble modular fixtures. One 4mm hex key builds everything; pace and precision are on you
• Position, level, power and test Experience Vaults so they run first time
• De-rig, pack and protect. What leaves the show must be ready for the next one
• Be Nova on-site: calm, tidy, on time

What you'll need

• Install, exhibition, AV, theatre or event crew experience, or solid trade skills and the discipline to work to a system
• Full UK driving licence (3.5t van experience useful; C1 a bonus)
• Comfort with early starts, late de-rigs and nights away
• Care for the kit. Our booths tour for years. They only do that if the crew treats them like assets, not rentals

Useful, not required

• Basic AV and electrical competence. You can safely power up and fault-find a screen or an LED run
• IPAF, PASMA, manual handling or first aid tickets
• Counterbalance forklift licence

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Off Grid

Manchester

• Open application

We would rather meet you now than write the advert later.

Nova is growing and the org chart is still being drawn. Welders, finishers, riggers, print and graphics people, technicians, production managers, and the hard to categorise. If you build things properly, and you care how they look when they are finished, there is something to talk about. Tell us what you do and where you think it fits. We will be honest about whether it does.

What always gets our attention

• Evidence of things you have actually made. Furniture, fabrication, electronics, installations, sets, anything with your hands in it
• Skills that sit next to ours: welding, upholstery, print and graphics, spray finishing, electronics, show control
• Production and project people who can hold a workshop to a date without wrecking the standard
• Live events, touring, exhibitions or install experience in any form

What to send

• A few lines on what you do, and which part of Nova you are aiming at
• Proof. Photographs, a portfolio, a repo, a video of something working
• What you want to be doing next, rather than the title you had last

Apply →