Deployment Success Manager

Job description

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. WHY VALON How many times in your career are you going to get the chance to deploy an eight- or nine-figure software contract 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. 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 that is where you come in. WHAT THIS ROLE IS Deployment Success Managers own our clients' post-go-live operational success on ValonOS: part operator, part client strategist, part data investigator, and part executive translator. You develop a deep understanding of each client's business and operating model, how ValonOS is configured for them, and what "doing the job correctly" looks like in practice. Then you co-develop solutions with clients to close gaps—in process, training, configuration, or product—and stay accountable until the client's operators are running sustainably and the business outcome is measurable. This is not a customer support role and it is not passive account management. After Deployment Strategy hands off at go-live, you own the ongoing partnership: monitoring operational health, diagnosing root causes when work breaks down, rebuilding processes around ValonOS capabilities, and identifying opportunities for growth, efficiency, and commercial expansion. The job is not to escalate and wait. The job is to figure out what is true, make the right call under ambiguity, and drive the work until the client's operation works in the real world. WHAT YOU WILL DO A client going live on ValonOS is not the finish line—it is when the real work begins. You inherit a complex servicing operation that must correctly and compliantly process loans every day, under regulatory scrutiny, with executives watching KPIs and operators still learning new workflows. A Deployment Success Manager: - Builds and monitors operational health dashboards (in partnership with analytics) from go-live onward, using data to identify where clients are struggling to complete work correctly, timely, or efficiently. - Investigates root causes through data and direct shadowing—training gaps, visibility issues, process debt, product gaps—and drives resolution instead of documenting problems. - Facilitates client development of new SOPs and operating processes that fully leverage ValonOS; patches understanding gaps with Implementation and escalates product holes to R&D through ProdOps. - Operates as a proactive safe-hands backstop when needed so client operations do not fail while permanent fixes are built. Clients ultimately own their outcomes; your job is to minimize thrash and drive durable success. - Owns the ongoing business-unit-level client relationship: regular business updates, executive business reviews, and escalated concerns. - Develops and maintains staffing models grounded in ValonOS data and each client's operating model—identifying over- or under-staffing and partnering with commercial leads on right-sizing. - Drives adoption of new products and surfaces upsell opportunities—loan/FTE growth, AI products, and expanded ValonOS usage—working closely with Product teams on rollout playbooks. - Serves as the two-way conduit between clients and R&D: performing discovery, surfacing gaps and feedback, and ensuring successful adoption of shipped features. HOW WE WORK A few things we actually believe, not aspirationally: - You own the outcome, not a ticket queue. You do not log a gap and walk away. You diagnose, fix process, influence product, and measure whether client operators can do their jobs. - Proactive beats reactive. Shifting from firefighting client escalations to proactive safe-hands and early signal from dashboards is how we scale across multiple deployments. - You figure it out. There will be incomplete data, undocumented legacy behavior, tense tradeoffs between client and product, and unclear ownership. The job is to create clarity anyway. - Code and data beat decks. A working query, a real dashboard, a validated SOP, or a clear operating decision wins over prettier slides. - You build alignment, but you don't hide behind consensus. You synthesize, recommend, commit, and defend decisions with evidence—from business unit leaders to R&D. - AI fluency is how the work gets done. Our team uses coding agents and in-house AI tooling. Our highest performers extend these tools and inform our engineers on what to build next. - You are writing the playbook. Deployment Success is a new function built for a rapidly expanding business. Every framework will be built by someone in this seat figuring it out for the first time. WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE You are succeeding here if client leaders trust you with their operation and senior Valon leaders feel the client’s business is in safe hands. That means: - Client operators can correctly and compliantly service on ValonOS—measured by business-unit-specific KPIs. - You can walk into a domain you do not understand, build a working model quickly, find the data and people who matter, and drive an operational outcome—not just a recommendation. - Your deep understanding of the client deployment shifts client behavior and informs company-level reviews. - You identify and advance revenue opportunities—stabilized loan/FTE growth and longer-term upsell—without losing sight of operational fundamentals. - You move fast without becoming sloppy. You are energized by incomplete context, not paralyzed by it. - You can hold a room of senior client leaders and still go low-level enough to shadow an operator, debug a workflow, or query the warehouse. - If you manage people, your pod gets sharper: clearer decisions, faster learning loops, stronger client trust, and better ICs. WHO THRIVES HERE This role is for people who have repeatedly been handed messy, important operational problems after the "launch" and found a way to make things actually work. We are especially excited by high-horsepower operators from servicing operations, enterprise implementation, customer success in complex environments, strategy consulting, banking, Chiefs of Staff, product or business operations, and people from other intense regulated-industry environments who have had to solve ambiguous problems under pressure. The common thread is not pedigree. It is speed of learning, quality of judgment, and willingness to own the outcome after go-live. You may be a fit if: - You are restless around operational ambiguity. Metrics are red and nobody agrees why—you start investigating anyway. - You have taught yourself new tools because the work demanded it (SQL, dashboards, AI agents, process documentation systems). - You are comfortable being both strategic (business reviews, staffing models, expansion) and extremely low-level (shadowing ops, rewriting SOPs) in the same week. - You can communicate clearly with client executives, operators, engineers, and internal partners without changing the substance of your thinking. - You care about durable client outcomes, not just hitting a go-live date. WHO MAY STRUGGLE HERE We are direct about fit because the cost of a mismatch is high—for us, for clients, and for you. This is probably not the right role if: - You prefer the adrenaline of greenfield implementation over the sustained ownership of making an operation run. - You prefer making recommendations over being accountable for whether operators can actually do the work. - You are uncomfortable with technical ambiguity, data messiness, or learning tools like SQL and AI agents quickly. - You want client, product, engineering, and operating problems to be neatly separated—this role sits at every intersection. - You are looking for a predictable support queue with defined SLAs and ticket routing. - For more senior levels, you are uncomfortable with commercial conversations (staffing right-sizing, upsell, expansion)—these are part of the role. WHAT WE LOOK FOR - A track record of driving operational outcomes in complex environments: strategy consulting, banking, product or business operations, past startup experience - Strong analytical and quantitative horsepower. You can decompose ambiguous operational problems and find the levers that matter. - Practical comfort with technical tools. You do not need to be a professional engineer, but you should be the kind of person who will use SQL, data, and AI tooling answer questions yourself. - Demonstrated AI fluency—not "I've used ChatGPT," but evidence you restructure workflows around AI and coding agents. - Clear, calibrated communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders—from operators to C-suite. - Ownership maturity: you move quickly with incomplete information and stay accountable when the answer changes. - Bachelor's degree required. Nice to have: Background in mortgage servicing, financial services, healthcare, government, or another regulated, operationally intense industry. Prior exposure to post-implementation success, workflow design, staffing model development, or business reviews at scale. Mortgage servicing knowledge is not required. Curiosity, horsepower, and the ability to learn a complex, regulated industry quickly are required. LEVELS Deployment Success Senior Associate: Owns a given business unit’s operational success at one to two clients. Deployment Success Manager: Works with multiple client business units at one to two clients. Partners effectively with client business unit leaders to drive business outcomes. May oversee LOCATION AND TRAVEL Preference for NYC or SF based candidates for improved collaboration, speed of execution, and problem-solving. Remote candidates to be considered on a case-by-case basis. 10% travel (approximately one week every two months) expected based on client needs and cross-team collaboration. BENEFITS - Compensation: competitive salary range of $130K-$180K, with a meaningful stake in the company via equity, and 401k plan. The base salary range reflects multiple levels - Deployment Success Senior Associate & Deployment Success Manager. We assess level based on a combination of past experience and interview performance. - This Base Compensation pay range applies to our New York City located staff and may differ according to location. - Health & well-being: we’ll invest in your physical and mental well-being with comprehensive medical, dental, & vision benefits - Commuter benefits: We offer pre-tax deductions for public transportation, rideshare services, and parking expenses to make your commute more affordable and convenient - Grow together: Company wide orientation for you to successfully onboard and other learning & development opportunities including regular review cycles that feature 360 degree feedback - Play together: quarterly budgets for team and company outings. Use it for team swag, cooking classes, or team dinners! - 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 so you can focus your energy on your newest addition 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.