Founder Associate

Job Description

Founder Associate | Valon

The Tone:
This is a full-time role at Valon, located in New York, NY. Valon, a Series C company backed by a16z, is building the AI-native operating system for regulated finance, starting with mortgage servicing. They transformed the industry by first building and operating their own mortgage servicing business managing over $110 billion in loans, enabling them to deeply understand complexity and achieve 60%+ margins from what was previously a 0% margin business. This role is a critical generalist position at the center of the company, designed to tackle the most high-leverage problems across the executive team as Valon expands its AI-native platform, ValonOS, beyond mortgage servicing into other regulated industries.

The TL;DR
• Role: Early Career
• Type: Full-time
• Location: Hybrid, New York, NY
• Pay: $110000–$200000 yearly
• Team: Reports directly to Valon’s Cofounder and President and works closely with the executive team.
• Mission: Solve the highest-impact problems facing the company by acting as a generalist working across various critical functions to compress operating experience.
• Tech Stack: Claude Code or similar agentic coding tools

What You’ll Actually Do
• Project Ownership: Own critical cross-functional projects from end-to-end, managing everything from scoping and stakeholder alignment to execution and delivery. These projects will span client deployments, internal operations, pricing strategies, and AI enablement initiatives.
• Executive Support: Act as a force multiplier for the COO by synthesizing information across teams, preparing materials for executive and board decisions, and preemptively identifying issues before they escalate.
• Function Building: Establish new processes, teams, or systems from scratch when the company needs something that doesn’t yet exist, defining what success looks like and standing it up.
• AI Integration: Routinely apply AI as a default tool, leveraging platforms like Claude Code or similar agentic coding tools to automate personal workflows, conduct data analysis, and achieve a work pace amplified by AI fluency.
• Problem Solving: Navigate complex, ambiguous problems with confidence, receiving high-level context, clear constraints, and trust from leadership, rather than detailed briefs or predefined swim lanes.

The Must-Haves
• Background: An early-career professional with 0–8 years of experience, demonstrating exceptional output and high agency, potentially having worked at a top consulting firm (MBB), a high-growth startup, an early-stage Chief of Staff role, or a rotational program.
• Experience: A natural generalist capable of rapidly acquiring expertise in diverse domains such as mortgage servicing economics, AI deployment strategy, and organizational design.
• Skills: Strong written communication, an AI-native approach to work with daily use of AI tools for amplification, and the ability to think in terms of automation over manual execution.
• Bonus: Possessing high agency and low ego, with a willingness to volunteer for less glamorous work, to ship imperfect solutions quickly, and to prioritize team outcomes over individual recognition.