Valency

Valency

Head of Engineering

Berkeley, CA · Exec

Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 104 days ago
TypeScriptNode.jsBackend DevelopmentPostgreSQLAWSOAuthMachine LearningResearchLeadershipCollaboration

About the role

  • As our Head of Engineering, you will report directly to the CEO.
  • You will work in tight collaboration with world-class peers in Head of Science and Head of Research.
  • If you thrive in a small, collaborative, fast-moving environments where technical decisions have immediate, visible impact on the product and the team, this role was built for you!

Responsibilities

  • Own the technical roadmap, making architectural decisions that balance shipping speed with long-term scalability
  • Drive the evolution of our cloud-based infrastructure
  • Anticipate scaling and reliability challenges before they become expensive, staying ahead of the product to validate approaches and surface unknowns early
  • This is a building role, not a meetings role
  • Drive measurable improvements in system performance, reliability, and operational cost
  • Build a robust infrastructure that will scale, as we serve the needs of the global scientific community
  • Be a true partner to the Head of Research and Head of Science - this is not a hand-off relationship, but tight collaborative loops

Requirements

  • Experience with our stack or adjacent: Node.js/TypeScript, AWS Lambda/CDK/Step Functions, PostgreSQL, Cloudflare
  • Experience scaling teams through key growth inflection points (e.g., 5 → 20 engineers)
  • Familiarity with auth systems (e.g. OAuth) and observability tooling

Skills

  • Deep hands-on expertise with cloud-native architectures
  • Some experience with Model Context Protocol (MCP), agentic frameworks, or AI-tool integration patterns
  • A track record of scaling and shipping production systems under real constraints, not just designing them, but delivering them
  • Ability to operate with high autonomy in a fast-moving, resource-constrained environment

Benefits

  • Familiarity with ML infrastructure, vector search, or document processing pipelines (added bonus for experience in research/academia)

Company info

  • You will make sure we are building the right things, the right way, at the right speed.

This listing is sourced directly from Valency's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.