Deployment Strategy Lead (People Manager)

Valon Tech • San Francisco, CA

10d • $175,000 - $250,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

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.

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.

Requirements

• 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 Haves

• 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.

Responsibilities

• 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 5-10 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.

Benefits

• Competitive salary range of $175K–$250K with a meaningful stake in the company via equity, and 401k plan.
• Comprehensive medical, dental, & vision benefits.
• Pre-tax deductions for public transportation, rideshare services, and parking expenses.
• Company wide orientation for you to successfully onboard and other learning & development opportunities including regular review cycles that feature 360 degree feedback.
• Quarterly budgets for team and company outings.
• Flexible paid time off, sick days, and 11 company holidays.
• 12 weeks off for both birthing and non-birthing parents - fully paid.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Manager
• Education Level: No Education Listed