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Valon is building an AI-native operating system for regulated finance, starting with mortgage servicing. The company operates its own mortgage servicing business managing $110+ billion in loans and has transformed the industry from 0% to 60%+ margins. Valon is a Series C company backed by a16z with engineering teams from Stripe, Jane Street, Meta, and Google.
As Head of Infrastructure, you will lead Valon's Cloud Infrastructure and Developer Infrastructure functions as one cohesive organization. This is a Director-level role responsible for the systems that run ValonOS and the platform enabling engineers to build and operate it.
You will set infrastructure strategy across Compute, Storage, data platforms, developer tooling, CI/CD, test infrastructure, observability, and engineering productivity. You will build and lead the organization delivering this strategy—managing managers and senior technical leaders as the team grows, while staying close enough to the technology to make sound architectural and investment decisions.
The role balances two complementary outcomes: a production platform that is secure, reliable, scalable, and cost-conscious; and a developer platform that makes it easy for engineers to deliver high-quality software quickly. You will partner with product, engineering, security, data, and operations leaders to turn those outcomes into a coherent roadmap and measurable results.
Valon handles more than 100 million background jobs per day and expects to scale more than 10x over the next two years. As ValonOS expands across major mortgage servicers, the infrastructure organization will be central to protecting reliability, accelerating innovation, and raising the bar for how regulated financial software is built.
Key responsibilities include:
- Define and communicate a multi-year infrastructure strategy spanning Cloud Infrastructure and Developer Infrastructure
- Lead, coach, and grow a high-performing organization, including engineering managers, senior technical leaders, and individual contributors
- Own the portfolio roadmap and investment decisions across Compute, Storage, data platforms, developer experience, CI/CD, test infrastructure, and observability
- Set company-wide standards for reliability, security, service ownership, incident management, developer productivity, and operational excellence
- Partner with executive and functional leaders to align infrastructure priorities with customer commitments, product strategy, and business goals
- Build the planning, review, and operating mechanisms that make progress visible and tradeoffs explicit
- Stay hands-on enough to guide architecture, challenge assumptions, and engage in the most important technical decisions and incidents
- Recruit exceptional talent, develop leaders, and create a culture of high agency, high accountability, direct feedback, and collaboration
- Represent infrastructure clearly to the broader company and make the organization a trusted partner to every engineering team
REQUIREMENTS:
- 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 4+ years leading multiple teams, engineering managers, or a substantial infrastructure organization
- Experience owning a broad infrastructure portfolio that includes cloud platforms, compute, storage, databases, SRE, developer infrastructure, or related domains
- Strong technical depth in distributed systems and a track record of operating critical production systems at scale
- Experience setting strategy across both production infrastructure and developer experience, or the ability to credibly lead leaders in both areas
- Hands-on experience with cloud providers such as AWS or GCP, container orchestration, data stores, CI/CD, and observability
- Excellent organizational judgment: ability to sequence foundational investments, make pragmatic tradeoffs, and connect technical work to business outcomes
- Demonstrated success hiring, developing, and retaining strong teams through periods of rapid growth and change
- Clear, concise communication and the ability to build alignment across engineering, product, security, data, and operations
