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Salary: USD 175,000 - 250,000 / annual
Valon is building an AI-native operating system for regulated finance, starting with mortgage servicing. The company is a Series C venture-backed firm (a16z) that operates its own mortgage servicing business managing $110+ billion in loans, using that operational depth to build software that actually works in highly regulated environments.
As a Deployment Strategy Lead, you will own the people and quality bar behind ValonOS deployments into major enterprise clients. You will build, coach, and hold accountable a team of 5-10 Deployment Strategists across the entire customer journey—from contract signature through go-live through adoption. This is a hybrid role combining people management, deployment operations, and quality control.
Key responsibilities include:
- Owning a deployment domain end-to-end: building specialist depth in a particular product surface, client function, or operational workflow, and setting the quality standard across every deployment in that domain.
- Managing and coaching 5-10 Deployment Strategists: running the learning loop, sharpening their judgment on ambiguous problems, and knowing when to let someone run independently versus when to step in.
- Staying accountable for the full customer journey, not just launch day. A deployment that goes live but doesn't stick is not a win.
- Staying close enough to the work to catch quality problems early—reviewing configurations, sitting in on client conversations, reading the data, not just status updates.
- Raising the bar on the team's craft: better decisions, faster learning loops, stronger client trust, sharper individual contributors.
- Translating upward and outward: to senior client leaders, to Valon's product and engineering teams, and to your reports.
- Building and extending DeploymentOS, the internal knowledge layer, so future Deployment Strategists don't solve the same problems from scratch.
The role is explicitly anti-consulting and anti-middle-management. You own outcomes, not org chart. Your team's deployments working is what you're measured on. You will figure things out with incomplete data, undocumented legacy behavior, tense client tradeoffs, and unclear ownership. Code and data beat decks. AI fluency is how the work gets done, not a nice-to-have. You are writing the playbook, not executing one.
Success means senior leaders trust your domain and team with ambiguous, high-stakes problems. Your deployments consistently land on time and on quality, and stick past go-live into real adoption. Your Deployment Strategists get sharper because of you. You can walk into a domain problem you don't fully understand, build a working model quickly, and know which reports to point at it and how to support them. You move fast without becoming sloppy.
Location and travel: NYC and SF-centered. Deployment Strategy Leads should expect to spend substantial time in the NYC and/or SF office, often 3-5 days per week depending on deployment phase, client work, and team needs. Travel is real during high-impact deployment phases, typically 10-20%, and may be higher depending on client needs or location.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Track record of managing teams (3+ direct reports) inside operating roles, strategy consulting, banking, investing, or other high-stakes, ambiguous environments.
- Deep comfort owning a specific domain—a product surface, client function, or workflow—and building real expertise there.
- Strong analytical and quantitative horsepower, with the ability to decompose ambiguous problems yourself and coach others to do the same.
- Practical comfort with technical tools. You don't need to be a professional engineer, but you should be able to use SQL, Python, or AI tools to check your team's work and answer questions yourself when needed.
- Demonstrated AI fluency—evidence you've taught yourself to work with coding agents, build small tools, or restructure workflows around AI, and that you can pass that fluency on.
- Clear, calibrated communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders, including senior client leaders.
- Ownership maturity for both outcomes and people: you can move quickly, make decisions with incomplete information, coach through mistakes, and stay accountable when the answer changes.
- Nice to have: prior experience as a Deployment Strategist or in a similar end-to-end deployment/implementation ownership role; background in financial services, healthcare, government, infrastructure, or another regulated, operationally intense industry.
