Founding Forward Deployed Engineer, Valon Mortgage

• You meet the same technical bar as our product engineers and have shipped meaningful systems
• You’ve been a founder, FDE, or the first/early engineer who owned outcomes with customers
• Experienced engineer: 1–7 years of software engineering experience, ideally with product ownership or startup DNA
• Builder, not a theorist: You care about outcomes. You bias toward MVPs, fast iterations, and visible impact over perfect code
• Comfortable with ambiguity: You can decompose fuzzy asks, prioritize independently, and execute without a spec
• Customer-centric: You’ve worked directly with users or clients, and you can speak business and code
• Owner mindset: You step up when something needs doing. You solve problems even when they “aren’t yours.”
• Candidates should apply if they are willing to be based out of NY or SF, while traveling to client locations 25-50% of the time
• This is a role for engineers who want to move fast, build with purpose, and make their fingerprints visible across the product and business

Desirable

• You will be the Founding Forward Deployed Engineer at Valon. You’ll be the technical arm of our most strategic partnerships—rapidly building bespoke solutions that drive customer value, unblock deployments, and ultimately shape our core product
• You’ll embed with our first scaled deployment, ship production software that unblocks value in days, and turn those patterns into reusable product and playbooks for future customers
• This is a founder‑like role with high autonomy, clear ownership, and direct impact on revenue and roadmap
• Own discovery and delivery end‑to‑end: scope, validate, build, deploy, and iterate in production
• Accelerate deployments by building high-impact integrations and prototypes for our most strategic enterprise clients
• Unblock revenue by solving the “last mile” of adoption—translating ambiguous needs into working software
• Bridge product and GTM by embedding with sales, product, and customer success teams to shape deployments and inform roadmap
• Act as the technical face with enterprise executives and operators; translate between business and code with credibility
• Rotate between client‑embedded cycles and in‑house cycles to harden what you built and level up the platform
• Build high‑leverage integrations, data pipelines, and bespoke features that become core product where it makes sense
• Identify and help land true expansions post‑sale, using willingness‑to‑pay as the filter for what matters
• As this is a unique role that allows for direct collaboration with our top clients, we have strict in-office and travel requirements
• You’ll operate at the intersection of AI, finance, and infrastructure—embedding with customers, shipping bespoke solutions, and influencing how our platform evolves
• Build AI-powered systems that run in production at national scale
• Own outcomes—not tickets
• Learn every day by working at the edge of customer pain and product truth
• Be part of a high-trust team solving a $20B infrastructure problem few are willing to touch
• You’ll succeed here if:
• You unblock customers and get them live—fast
• You turn ambiguous asks into working software in days, not months
• You’re trusted by product, sales, and clients alike
• Your builds become product, not just prototypes
• You step up when others are still figuring out who owns the problem