Staff Cloud Infrastructure Engineer at Valon

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 ENGINEERING AT VALON Our engineering team powers a modern software ecosystem designed to disrupt one of the most outdated and heavily regulated industries in finance: mortgage servicing.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’ve built the foundation of a scalable platform capable of managing billions in assets with precision and reliability. Now we’re focused on scaling infrastructure, improving developer experience, and building high-leverage systems that support rapid product iteration and long-term business growth. We’re 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 offices in San Francisco as well. We also fully support remote work. ABOUT THE ROLE We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer to help define and drive the technical direction of our Cloud Infrastructure team within Platform Engineering. This is a role for someone who has seen what good infrastructure looks like at scale and wants to build it from a position of real ownership. You’ll work across Valon’s production systems—compute, databases, storage, and networking—shaping the infrastructure foundations that every product and team depends on. We handle over 100 million background jobs per day and expect to scale more than 10x over the next two years. As our commercial pipeline accelerates and we bring on major enterprise customers, the challenges shift from feature delivery to scale, reliability, and increasingly complex deployment architectures. You’ll set the technical direction for how we meet those challenges. This is a deeply technical, high-autonomy role. You’ll partner closely with the Cloud Infrastructure EM, engineering leadership, and cross-functional stakeholders to translate business and product needs into infrastructure strategy—and then execute on it. You’ll be expected to operate with a long time horizon, identifying the investments we need to make now to support the next several years of growth. EXAMPLE PROJECTS ON THE ROADMAP: - Architect and lead the adoption of new data stores to support our growth trajectory: Vitess, Clickhouse, Redis. - Design the next generation of our batch processing control plane for faster component creation and fulfillment at 10x current scale. - Build production-equivalent sandbox environments for customer testing, demos, and onboarding. - Define the infrastructure strategy for new enterprise deployment models, including configurations that meet the security and data residency requirements of top-tier financial institutions. RESPONSIBILITIES - Set technical direction for cloud infrastructure at Valon, defining the architecture, standards, and roadmap for compute, storage, databases, and networking. - Lead the design and execution of complex, cross-cutting infrastructure initiatives—from new data store adoption to novel deployment architectures for enterprise customers. - Own the reliability, scalability, and security posture of Valon’s production infrastructure, driving systemic improvements across the stack. - Serve as a key technical partner to engineering leadership, product, and operations—translating business requirements into infrastructure strategy and ensuring alignment across teams. - Drive architectural decisions through design docs, RFCs, and technical reviews, setting a high bar for rigor and clarity. - Mentor and elevate the team through code reviews, design guidance, and active knowledge sharing, raising the overall technical bar. - Contribute to incident response and on-call, using incidents as opportunities to drive meaningful reliability improvements. - Identify and advocate for long-horizon infrastructure investments that position Valon for the next phase of scale and customer growth. IDEAL BACKGROUND - 7+ years of professional experience in infrastructure engineering, platform engineering, SRE, DevOps, or cloud systems, with a track record of operating at staff-level scope and influence. - Deep hands-on experience managing and operating cloud infrastructure on AWS, GCP, or Azure at significant scale, including designing for high availability, fault tolerance, and cost efficiency. - Strong expertise in containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi, or similar). - Demonstrated ability to lead complex technical initiatives end-to-end: scoping, designing, building consensus, executing, and driving adoption across teams. - Deep understanding of distributed systems: networking, storage, databases, load balancing, observability, and performance at scale. - Solid engineering fundamentals—you write clean, well-tested code and can contribute meaningfully to services and tooling, even if infrastructure is your primary domain. - A product mindset and strong business intuition: you understand how infrastructure decisions create leverage (or bottlenecks) for the broader organization. - Excellent communication skills—you can explain complex technical trade-offs clearly to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders. - Experience in fast-paced, high-growth environments. Familiarity with regulated industries (fintech, healthcare, etc.) is a bonus but not required. BENEFITS - Compensation: competitive salary with a meaningful stake in the company via equity, and 401k plan. - Health & well-being: comprehensive medical, dental, and vision benefits. - Commuter benefits: pre-tax deductions for public transportation, rideshare services, and parking expenses. - Grow together: company-wide orientation, learning & development opportunities, and regular review cycles featuring 360-degree feedback. - Play together: quarterly budgets for team and company outings. - Generous time off: flexible paid time off, sick days, and 11 company holidays. - Baby bonding time: 12 weeks off for both birthing and non-birthing parents, fully paid. Throughout the interview process, please remember that emails will only be from valon.com [Upgrade to PRO to see link] email addresses. We will never ask for any personally identifiable information during the interview process itself. Please reach out to [Upgrade to PRO to see contact] 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.