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Valon is building an AI-native operating system for regulated finance, starting with mortgage servicing. The company is a Series C venture-backed startup (a16z) that has transformed mortgage servicing from a 0% margin business into 60%+ margins by building and operating its own mortgage servicing platform managing $110+ billion in loans. ValonOS is the unified platform enabling every process to be structured and programmable, positioning the company to leverage AI agents for continuous operational improvement.
You will lead the Developer Infrastructure team within the Platform organization, managing a high-impact group responsible for the systems that shape how every Valon engineer builds, tests, ships, and operates software. This is a hands-on leadership role where you will treat developer infrastructure as a product: understand engineering team needs, define a clear roadmap, and make the common path fast, safe, observable, and pleasant.
Your scope spans internal developer tooling (local development, test infrastructure, CI/CD, release workflows, monitoring and observability, engineering standards, and AI-enabled tools). You will partner closely with application, data, security, and operations teams to improve the entire software lifecycle. You will guide architecture decisions, write code or debug systems when needed, and stay close to the developer experience you are improving.
Key responsibilities include leading and growing a team of engineers focused on developer infrastructure and platform tooling; owning technical strategy, planning, and execution with emphasis on reliability, security, usability, and measurable productivity gains; acting as a strong technical mentor and hands-on contributor; partnering across engineering to understand friction points and deliver high-leverage improvements; building effective mechanisms for prioritization and continuous feedback; establishing engineering processes that improve velocity, quality, and operational readiness; and investing in recruiting and developing talent through coaching and mentorship.
Examples of roadmap work include making integration tests easy to create and run in CI, enabling safe online database schema migrations via Vitess, ensuring web client compatibility with GraphQL schemas before deployment, reducing local setup time, building actionable observability and release feedback loops, and adopting AI tooling that improves engineering throughput while preserving quality and security.
Valon's engineering team comprises high-agency engineers from Stripe, Jane Street, Meta, and Google. Headquarters are in New York City with a satellite San Francisco office; the company fully supports remote work.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 6+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years leading and developing engineering teams
- Experience building or operating developer platforms, internal tools, CI/CD systems, test infrastructure, release automation, or observability systems
- Strong systems thinking and understanding of how developer workflows, application architecture, and production infrastructure fit together
- Hands-on experience with cloud providers (AWS or GCP), containerization (Docker or Kubernetes), CI/CD pipelines, and modern observability stacks
- Product mindset and ability to translate internal customer needs into simple, scalable technical solutions
- Track record of leading teams in fast-paced, high-growth environments and aligning partners around a shared roadmap
- Demonstrated ability to mentor and grow engineers while fostering a high-performance, feedback-driven team culture
- Excellent communication skills and bias toward action, learning, and continuous improvement
