Head of Infrastructure

ABOUT THE COMPANY

Valon is building the AI-native operating system for regulated finance, starting with mortgage servicing.

We're a Series C company backed by a16z, transforming industries that others have written off as too complex to innovate.

Rather than build on top of broken legacy systems, we took a different approach: we built and operate our own mortgage servicing business managing $110+ billion in loans. This wasn't the end goal, it was how we deeply understood the complexity needed to build software that actually works in regulated industries.

The results speak for themselves. We've transformed mortgage servicing from a 0% margin business into 60%+ margins while dramatically improving customer experience. Major enterprise contracts are now deploying across the industry.

ValonOS is our unified platform that makes every process structured and programmable and it is perfectly positioned for the AI era. When everything flows through one system with rich data, AI agents don't just automate tasks, they continuously improve entire operations. Mortgage servicing is just the beginning of our vision to transform regulated industries and beyond.

ENGINEERING AT VALON

Our engineering team powers a modern software ecosystem designed to disrupt one of the most outdated and heavily regulated industries in finance: mortgage servicing. We have built the foundation of a scalable platform capable of managing billions in assets with precision and reliability. Now we are focused on scaling infrastructure, improving developer experience, and building high-leverage systems that support rapid product iteration and long-term business growth. We are a tight-knit, high-agency group of engineers from Stripe, Jane Street, Meta, and Google, and we aim to do the best work of our lives—together.

Our headquarters are in New York City, with a satellite San Francisco office that opened last year. We also fully support remote work.

ABOUT THE ROLE

We are looking for a Head of Infrastructure to lead Valon's Cloud Infrastructure and Developer Infrastructure functions as one cohesive organization. This is a senior manager, or potential Director level role with responsibility for the systems that run ValonOS and the platform that enables engineers to build and operate it.

You will set the infrastructure strategy across Compute, Storage, data platforms, developer tooling, CI/CD, test infrastructure, observability, and engineering productivity. You will build and lead the organization that delivers 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 requires balancing 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.

Examples of work on the roadmap include:

• Scaling compute and batch-processing systems to support rapid growth in production workloads.

• Building a durable, well-operated storage and data platform, including migrations, replication, backup, recovery, and performance.

• Creating production-equivalent environments for customer testing, demos, and internal development.

• Making integration testing, schema compatibility, releases, and observability easier and more reliable for every engineering team.

• Adopting AI-enabled developer tools with appropriate quality, security, and governance controls.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• 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.

IDEAL BACKGROUND

• 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: you can 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.

BENEFITS

• Competitive salary with meaningful equity and a 401(k) plan.

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage.

• Pre-tax commuter benefits for transportation, rideshare, and parking.

• Company-wide onboarding, career development, and regular review cycles with 360-degree feedback.

• Quarterly budgets for team activities, swag, dinners, and more.

• Flexible PTO, sick days, and 11 company holidays.

• 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave for all new parents.

Throughout the interview process, please remember that emails will only be from valon.com http://valon.com email addresses. We will never ask for any personally identifiable information during the interview process itself. Please reach out to talent@valon.com if you have any requests to verify the authenticity of an outreach.

Valon is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to diversity and inclusion in the workplace. We prohibit discrimination and harassment of any kind based on race, color, sex, religion, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, genetic information, pregnancy, or any other protected characteristic as outlined by federal, state, or local laws. Valon makes hiring decisions based solely on qualifications, merit, and business needs at the time.