Staff Product Designer, Valon Mortgage

$167.4-226.6k

+ Equity

Senior and Expert level
Remote in US
Valon Mortgage

Transforming $25B+ mortgage servicing market with software

Be an early applicant

Valon Mortgage

Transforming $25B+ mortgage servicing market with software

201-500 employees

FintechB2CMortgagesHome improvementFinancial ServicesSaaSSocial Impact

Be an early applicant

$167.4-226.6k

+ Equity

Senior and Expert level
Remote in US

201-500 employees

FintechB2CMortgagesHome improvementFinancial ServicesSaaSSocial Impact

Company mission

To champion homeowners on their financial journey, as the partner they trust with their home and future.

Role

Who you are

  • User Empathy and Advocacy: Deep understanding of user needs and ability to represent those needs in every design decision
  • Strong Communication and Collaboration: Ability to articulate design decisions and collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams
  • Critical Thinking and Thought Partnership: Provide thoughtful input on product and design strategy, focusing on long-term impact
  • Humble and Growth-Oriented Mindset: Continuously seeking ways to improve and contribute to team success
  • Balanced Approach: Care about the big picture but execute with precision in design details
  • Startup Mindset: Excitement for working in a fast-paced, evolving startup environment
  • 7+ years of experience in user-centered product design, with a strong portfolio of work
  • Experience with large-scale platform products and collaboration tools
  • Experience in designing B2B SaaS product
  • Ability to balance methodological rigor with scrappiness and creativity in a fast-paced environment
  • Excellent written and verbal communication skills

Desirable

  • Experience working in a startup environment
  • Familiarity with the mortgage industry, prop tech, or financial systems
  • Experience designing for both consumer tech and enterprise software

What the job involves

  • We are seeking a Staff Product Designer to lead key design efforts across the Product Infrastructure team
  • In this role, you will define the design vision and execute strategies that influence user experience at a systems level, guiding the evolution of Valon’s platform
  • You will have a significant impact on Valon’s long-term business goals by shaping customizable software that supports both internal teams and external clients in the mortgage servicing industry
  • You’ll collaborate with cross-functional teams to develop design solutions that support multi-tenant systems and highly configurable tools that scale to meet diverse client needs
  • As a Staff Designer, you will also elevate the design team’s capabilities, ensuring attention to detail and driving design excellence across the organization
  • Design in Ambiguity: Embrace the challenge of designing from the ground up, leading the creation of 0-to-1 user experiences for our upcoming infrastructure projects, while navigating evolving business requirements and ambiguity
  • Think in Modularity: Lead the design of highly configurable system-level functionalities. Create small, interchangeable components that adapt to different use cases efficiently
  • Consider Diverse User Roles: Advocate for the needs of user roles from IT professionals to Client Experience agents and back-office teams, through user-centered design. Ensure designs can scale and support varied user experiences
  • Evolve Design System: Contribute to and refine Valon’s design system, ensuring consistency and scalability across all products
  • Create Customizable Systems: Build flexible, user-friendly interfaces that empower subservicers to customize workflows, process management, and automation for both technical and non-technical stakeholders
  • Simplify Complex Information: Design information architecture that simplifies complex loan data sets, making them easily accessible and contextually relevant for users—ensuring data is organized effectively
  • Drive User Journeys & Prototyping: Develop and iterate on user flows, wireframes, and prototypes, ensuring design decisions are aligned with business and user needs—particularly for complex mortgage servicing use cases
  • Champion Cross-Functional and Cross-Team Collaboration: Work with product, engineering, and business teams to ensure design solutions are feasible, aligned with objectives, and informed by insights from other teams
  • Provide Design Mentorship: Collaborate with other Product Designers, providing constructive and motivating feedback that helps improve their skills and the outcomes of their work. Actively participate in design critiques to ensure quality and consistency across Valon products

Our take

Valon is attempting to bring smoother, clearer customer service to the often unsophisticated industry of mortgage services. Its cloud-native mobile platform allows borrowers to make payments and manage escrow accounts while avoiding time-consuming call centers, inaccurate information and poorly designed websites. In turn, lenders can use the platform to request API feeds to gather information on customer performance.

The company is aiming to disrupt and bring down the costs in a market that it sees as heavily monopolized, and which is largely devoid of customer-oriented innovation. Currently, mortgage servicing giant Black Knight controls over half of all residential loans in the US, the result of which has seen a 250% increase in servicing costs in the last decade.

Valon's growth so far has been remarkable. The company went from zero contracts in 2019 to $10 billion in mortgages in 2020. Its remarkable growth attracted over $70 million in funding in 2021. On top of this boost, it has further diversified its capabilities to include servicing government-sponsored home loans from the Federal National Mortgage Association.

Freddie headshot

Freddie

Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle

Insights

B Corporation
Top investors

Few candidates hear
back within 2 weeks

21% employee growth in 12 months

Company

Funding (last 2 of 6 rounds)

Jul 2024

$69.8m

LATE VC

Aug 2022

$61.5m

LATE VC

Total funding: $248.8m

Company benefits

  • Fully Covered Healthcare Premiums on Zero Deductible Medical/Dental/Vision Insurance Plans
  • Flexible Sick Days
  • Equity Packages
  • Generous Vacation Policy + Multiple Company Holidays
  • Provided Laptop, Custom Acessories, and Ergonomic Equipment
  • Commuter Benefits
  • Paid Parental Leave
  • Unlimited Snacks and Drinks

Company values

  • Do what’s best for Valon - We always do what’s best for the business. We prioritize Valon’s long-term success over personal or departmental interests. Every decision should keep in mind what’s globally optimal for Valon.
  • Deliver impact - We do the hard thing to get the job done—specifically, to get the job done right. Valon values high ownership, end-to-end accountability, and delivering concrete outcomes.
  • Communicate with candor - Valon values intellectual honesty and direct communication for both individual growth and the best possible outcomes. We stay humble and open-minded.
  • Act with urgency - We operate with a strong bias for action to make fast progress consistently. This compounds, and we win by moving mountains over long time periods.
  • Reason from first principles - We believe in thinking deeply and precisely. We empower our team with deep business context so they can build their reasoning from the ground up rather than being bound by convention or what everyone else does.
  • Focus on what matters most - We constantly assess and re-orient ourselves to do the work that matters most for the business. We are always laser-focused on pushing the business forward.

Company HQ

Union Square, New York, NY

Leadership

Studied Computer Science at Harvard. Interned as a Software Engineer at The White House, and Google. Was an Analyst at Goldman Sachs. Spent 4 years as a Principal to Soros Fund Management.

Studied Computer Science and Statistics at Harvard. Worked at Samlyn Capital and Two Sigma prior to joining Valon.

Studied Electrical Engineering at Santa Clara University. Co-founded Bump Technologies which was acquired by Google.

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