Deployment Success Manager

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. We built and operate our own mortgage servicing business managing $110+ billion in loans to deeply understand the complexity needed to build software that actually works in regulated industries. We've transformed mortgage servicing from a 0% margin business into 60%+ margins while dramatically improving customer experience. ValonOS is our unified platform that makes every process structured and programmable, perfectly positioned for the AI era.

About the role

Deployment Success Managers own our clients' post-go-live operational success on ValonOS: part operator, part client strategist, part data investigator, and part executive translator. You develop a deep understanding of each client's business and operating model, how ValonOS is configured for them, and what "doing the job correctly" looks like in practice. Then you co-develop solutions with clients to close gaps—in process, training, configuration, or product—and stay accountable until the client's operators are running sustainably and the business outcome is measurable.

This is not a customer support role or passive account management. You own the ongoing partnership: monitoring operational health, diagnosing root causes when work breaks down, rebuilding processes around ValonOS capabilities, and identifying opportunities for growth, efficiency, and commercial expansion. The job is to figure out what is true, make the right call under ambiguity, and drive the work until the client's operation works in the real world.

Responsibilities

• Build and monitor operational health dashboards (in partnership with analytics) from go-live onward, using data to identify where clients are struggling to complete work correctly, timely, or efficiently.
• Investigate root causes through data and direct shadowing—training gaps, visibility issues, process debt, product gaps—and drive resolution instead of documenting problems.
• Facilitate client development of new SOPs and operating processes that fully leverage ValonOS; patch understanding gaps with Implementation and escalate product holes to R&D through ProdOps.
• Operate as a proactive safe-hands backstop when needed so client operations do not fail while permanent fixes are built.
• Own the ongoing business-unit-level client relationship: regular business updates, executive business reviews, and escalated concerns.
• Develop and maintain staffing models grounded in ValonOS data and each client's operating model—identifying over- or under-staffing and partnering with commercial leads on right-sizing.
• Drive adoption of new products and surface upsell opportunities—loan/FTE growth, AI products, and expanded ValonOS usage—working closely with Product teams on rollout playbooks.
• Serve as the two-way conduit between clients and R&D: performing discovery, surfacing gaps and feedback, and ensuring successful adoption of shipped features.

How we work

A Few Things We Actually Believe, Not Aspirationally:

• You own the outcome, not a ticket queue. You do not log a gap and walk away. You diagnose, fix process, influence product, and measure whether client operators can do their jobs.
• Proactive beats reactive. Shifting from firefighting client escalations to proactive safe-hands and early signal from dashboards is how we scale across multiple deployments.
• You figure it out. There will be incomplete data, undocumented legacy behavior, tense tradeoffs between client and product, and unclear ownership. The job is to create clarity anyway.
• Code and data beat decks. A working query, a real dashboard, a validated SOP, or a clear operating decision wins over prettier slides.
• You build alignment, but you don't hide behind consensus. You synthesize, recommend, commit, and defend decisions with evidence—from business unit leaders to R&D.
• AI fluency is how the work gets done. Our team uses coding agents and in-house AI tooling. Our highest performers extend these tools and inform our engineers on what to build next.
• You are writing the playbook. Deployment Success is a new function built for a rapidly expanding business. Every framework will be built by someone in this seat figuring it out for the first time.

What success looks like

• Client operators can correctly and compliantly service on ValonOS—measured by business-unit-specific KPIs.
• You can walk into a domain you do not understand, build a working model quickly, find the data and people who matter, and drive an operational outcome—not just a recommendation.
• Your deep understanding of the client deployment shifts client behavior and informs company-level reviews.
• You identify and advance revenue opportunities—stabilized loan/FTE growth and longer-term upsell—without losing sight of operational fundamentals.
• You move fast without becoming sloppy. You are energized by incomplete context, not paralyzed by it.
• You can hold a room of senior client leaders and still go low-level enough to shadow an operator, debug a workflow, or query the warehouse.
• If you manage people, your pod gets sharper: clearer decisions, faster learning loops, stronger client trust, and better ICs.

Qualifications

• A track record of driving operational outcomes in complex environments: strategy consulting, banking, product or business operations, past startup experience.
• Strong analytical and quantitative horsepower. You can decompose ambiguous operational problems and find the levers that matter.
• Practical comfort with technical tools. You do not need to be a professional engineer, but you should be the kind of person who will use SQL, data, and AI tooling to answer questions yourself.
• Demonstrated AI fluency—not "I've used ChatGPT," but evidence you restructure workflows around AI and coding agents.
• Clear, calibrated communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders—from operators to C-suite.
• Ownership maturity: you move quickly with incomplete information and stay accountable when the answer changes.
• Bachelor's degree required.

Skills

• Restless around operational ambiguity. Metrics are red and nobody agrees why—you start investigating anyway.
• Self-taught new tools because the work demanded it (SQL, dashboards, AI agents, process documentation systems).
• Comfortable being both strategic (business reviews, staffing models, expansion) and extremely low-level (shadowing ops, rewriting SOPs) in the same week.
• Communicate clearly with client executives, operators, engineers, and internal partners without changing the substance of your thinking.
• Care about durable client outcomes, not just hitting a go-live date.

Who thrives here

This role is for people who have repeatedly been handed messy, important operational problems after the "launch" and found a way to make things actually work. We are especially excited by high-horsepower operators from servicing operations, enterprise implementation, customer success in complex environments, strategy consulting, banking, Chiefs of Staff, product or business operations, and people from other intense regulated-industry environments who have had to solve ambiguous problems under pressure. The common thread is not pedigree. It is speed of learning, quality of judgment, and willingness to own the outcome after go-live.

Who may struggle here

We are direct about fit because the cost of a mismatch is high—for us, for clients, and for you. This is probably not the right role if:

• You prefer the adrenaline of greenfield implementation over the sustained ownership of making an operation run.
• You prefer making recommendations over being accountable for whether operators can actually do the work.
• You are uncomfortable with technical ambiguity, data messiness, or learning tools like SQL and AI agents quickly.
• You want client, product, engineering, and operating problems to be neatly separated—this role sits at every intersection.
• You are looking for a predictable support queue with defined SLAs and ticket routing.
• For more senior levels, you are uncomfortable with commercial conversations (staffing right-sizing, upsell, expansion)—these are part of the role.

Nice to have

• Background in mortgage servicing, financial services, healthcare, government, or another regulated, operationally intense industry.
• Prior exposure to post-implementation success, workflow design, staffing model development, or business reviews at scale.

Mortgage servicing knowledge is not required. Curiosity, horsepower, and the ability to learn a complex, regulated industry quickly are required.