Founder Associate

Valon Tech•New York, NY

9d•Hybrid

About The Position

We're hiring a Founder Associate to work directly with Valon's COO and executive team on the highest-leverage problems facing the company. This is not a traditional strategy & ops role — it's a generalist seat for someone with uncommon judgment, high agency, and the ability to context-switch across wildly different problem types in a single week. One day you're modeling the economics of a new client deployment. The next you're redesigning an internal process that's breaking at scale. The day after you're drafting a board-ready memo or sitting in a client meeting helping close a deal. You won't specialize — you'll go wherever the most important unsolved problem is. This role is designed for someone early in their career who wants to compress a decade of operating experience into a few years by working at the center of gravity of a fast-scaling company.

Requirements

0–8 years of experience — you might be coming from a top consulting firm (MBB), a high-growth startup, an early-stage CoS role, or a rotational program. What matters more than pedigree is evidence of exceptional output and high agency.
Generalist by nature — you're the person who picks up new domains fast, whether it's mortgage servicing economics, AI deployment strategy, or org design.
High agency and low ego — you volunteer for the unglamorous work, you don't wait for permission, and you'd rather ship something imperfect today than perfect it next month.
Strong written communicator — you can write a crisp one-pager, a persuasive Slack message, or a detailed process doc with equal fluency.
AI-native — you already use AI tools daily to amplify your work. You think in terms of "how do I automate this" before "how do I do this manually."
Based in New York — this role is hybrid and requires in-person presence.

Responsibilities

Own critical cross-functional projects end-to-end — scoping, stakeholder alignment, execution, and delivery. These will span client deployments, internal operations, pricing, AI enablement, and whatever else matters most right now.
Be the COO's force multiplier — synthesize information across teams, prepare materials for executive and board-level decisions, and flag problems before they become crises.
Build new functions from 0 → 1 — when Valon needs something that doesn't exist yet (a process, a team, a system), you'll be the person who figures out what good looks like and stands it up.
Use AI as a default tool — you regularly use Claude Code or similar agentic coding tools to automate your own workflows, analyze data, and move at a pace that would be impossible without AI fluency.
Navigate ambiguity with confidence — you won't get detailed briefs or clear swim lanes. You'll get context, constraints, and trust.