Deployment Strategy Lead (People Manager)

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. WHAT THIS ROLE IS Deployment Strategy Leads own the people and the quality bar behind ValonOS deployments. You are a specialist in a deployment domain, and you build, coach, and hold accountable a team of 3-10 people. Deployment Strategists across the entire customer journey — from contract signature through go-live through adoption. You are part manager, part deployment operator, part quality control. The team's outcomes are your outcomes. The job is not to manage from a dashboard. You stay close enough to the work to catch problems before they become client-facing, and close enough to your people to know when they need a stretch, a course correction, or to be unblocked.   WHY VALON How many times in your career are you going to get the chance to build and run a team deploying eight-and nine-figure software contracts into one of the most regulated industries on the planet? Not many. That's what we do here. Valon is the AI-native operating system for mortgage servicing — a $13 trillion industry running on infrastructure built before the iPhone. We did not try to fix it from the outside. We bought our way in: built and operate our own mortgage servicing business managing $110B+ in loans, used that operation to deeply understand every workflow that breaks at scale, and then built the software we wished existed. The result: a 0% margin business turned 60%+. Our own servicing operation runs at 4x the employee efficiency of the industry. Major enterprise servicers — including Newrez — are now deploying ValonOS across the industry. The contracts we are rolling out are some of the largest and most complex enterprise software deployments anywhere in financial services right now. Deployment Strategy Leads make sure the people running those rollouts get better every quarter, not just busier.   WHY MORTGAGE SERVICING IS THE MOST INTERESTING PROBLEM YOU'VE (PROBABLY) NEVER THOUGHT ABOUT Every monthly payment from a homeowner triggers a chain reaction: money has to move, accounting entries have to balance, escrow has to disburse to the right counties and insurers, and every step has to satisfy regulators across all 50 states — each with its own foreclosure rules, notice timelines, fee restrictions, and licensing regimes. Get any of it wrong and you have created a CFPB headline. Now do that for millions of loans, with hundreds of legacy vendors, dozens of capital partners, and operators who have been doing it one way for 30 years. Mortgage servicing has resisted software automation for decades not because the individual problems are unsolvable, but because the abstractions are so hard to model correctly that no one had done it. We did. It took six years. Now we are deploying it across the industry — and your team is on point.   WHAT YOU WILL DO A client recently described what we do as “open-heart surgery while the patient is still walking around running their business.” That is accurate. Your team is handed multi-decade-old operations processing hundreds of thousands of loans, with a reputation, a regulator, and a P&L on the line — and you have to make sure every deployment lands without anything breaking. A Deployment Strategy Lead: - Owns a deployment domain end-to-end: builds specialist depth in a particular product surface, client function, or operational workflow, and is the standard-bearer for quality in that domain across every deployment it touches. - Manages and coaches 3-10 Deployment Strategists: runs the learning loop, sharpens their judgment on ambiguous problems, and knows when to let someone run and when to step in. - Stays accountable for the full customer journey, not just launch day: contract to go-live to adoption. A deployment that goes live but doesn't stick is not a win. - Stays close enough to the work to catch quality problems early — reviewing configurations, sitting in on client conversations, reading the data, not just the status updates. - Raises the bar on the team's craft: better decisions, faster learning loops, stronger client trust, sharper ICs. - Translates upward and outward: to senior client leaders who have been doing this for 25 years, to Valon's product and engineering teams, and to your own reports who need clarity, not just direction. - Builds and extends DeploymentOS, our internal knowledge layer, so the next Deployment Strategist to hit a given problem doesn't have to solve it from scratch.   HOW WE WORK A few things we actually believe, not aspirationally: - You own the outcome, not the org chart. This is the anti-consulting, anti-middle-management role. Your team's deployments working is what you're measured on, not headcount or process. Our contracts are performance-based, so when your team's deployments work, Valon wins. - You figure it out. There will be incomplete data, undocumented legacy behavior, tense client tradeoffs, and unclear ownership — both in the deployments and in the team problems. The job is to create clarity anyway. - You build alignment, but you do not hide behind consensus. You synthesize, recommend, commit, and defend the decision with evidence, and you coach your team to do the same. - Code and data beat decks. A working query, a real workflow, a shipped change, or a clear operating decision wins over prettier slides — for you and for the people you manage. - AI fluency is how the work gets done, not a nice-to-have. Your team uses coding agents, builds custom skills, and develops DeploymentOS. Part of your job is making sure that fluency keeps compounding across your pod. - You are writing the playbook, not executing one. Every framework we use was built by someone figuring it out for the first time. You are responsible for the next versions, and for making sure your team's hard-won lessons don't die with the individual deployment.   WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE You are succeeding here if senior leaders trust your domain and your team with ambiguous, high-stakes problems and feel the work is in safe hands. That means: - Your deployments consistently land on time, on quality, and stick past go-live into real adoption. - Your Deployment Strategists get sharper because of you — clearer decisions, faster learning loops, better client trust, stronger individual judgment. - You can walk into a domain problem you don't fully understand, build a working model quickly, and know which of your reports to point at it and how to support them. - You move fast without becoming sloppy, and you keep your team moving fast without letting quality slip. - You can hold a room of senior client leaders and still go low-level enough to debug a workflow, query, data pipeline, or operating edge case yourself when it matters. - You know the difference between coaching someone through ambiguity and rescuing them from it, and you choose deliberately.   WHO THRIVES HERE This role is for people who have built or scaled a team inside a high-stakes, ambiguous environment — not just managed one that was already running smoothly. We are especially excited by people with experience managing 3+ direct reports who also want to stay close to the actual work: former Deployment Strategists ready to lead, consultants or bankers who've managed teams and want to own outcomes instead of recommendations, and operators from other intense environments who know how to build a team's judgment, not just its headcount. You may be a fit if: - You are restless around ambiguity, in the work and in managing people through it. - You have taught yourself new tools because the work demanded it, and you expect the same of your team. - You are comfortable being both a manager and extremely low-level in the same day. - You can communicate clearly with executives, operators, engineers, clients, and your own reports without changing the substance of your thinking. - You care about building a durable team and body of work, not just being near an interesting problem.   WHO MAY STRUGGLE HERE We are direct about fit because the cost of a mismatch is high, for us and for you. This is probably not the right role if: - You are looking for a management lane focused on process and reporting rather than deployment outcomes and client adoption. - You prefer overseeing from a distance over staying close enough to the work to catch quality problems yourself. - You are uncomfortable with technical ambiguity, data messiness, or the tools (SQL, Python, AI agents) your team uses daily. - You want a role where people management and deployment ownership are neatly separated. - You are looking for generic enterprise SaaS management work. We are rebuilding the operating system   WHAT WE LOOK FOR - A 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.   LOCATION AND TRAVEL We are NYC and SF-centered and use in-person time as a tool for speed, trust, and hard problem-solving. In practice, 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 around 10-20%, and may be higher depending on client needs or where you are based. We do not manage this by rigid attendance rules; we expect people in this role to use judgment about where the work and the coaching get done best.   BENEFITS - Compensation: competitive salary range of $175K–$225K with a mea…