---
title: 'Head of Engineering at Valency Systems Inc.'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-engineering-valency-systems-inc-berkeley-ma0vevetyrjb'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-08'
---

# Head of Engineering at Valency Systems Inc.

- **Company:** Valency Systems Inc.
- **Location:** Berkeley, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-04-08
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-08
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/valency/8b493887-fff0-4aed-b774-cfaed07cdfbf

## Job description

## ABOUT VALENCY

Valency Systems is a small, dynamic team of engineers, scientists, and researchers building the global hub for the agentic research era.

We're based in Berkeley, California, and we're building something that matters. If you care about open science, advancing research at the speed of thought, and using AI to accelerate discovery, we'd love to talk.

Our team is hybrid. We come together in person 3 days a week, with the option for 2 days of remote work.

## THE POSITION

As our Head of Engineering, you will report directly to the CEO. You will own the technical architecture, define the engineering culture, hire and grow an engineering team, and shape how we build and ship.

You'll be hands-on, building your engineering organization from the ground up and leveraging the power of AI coding tools to accelerate innovation. You will work in tight collaboration with world-class peers in Head of Science and Head of Research. You will make sure we are building the right things, the right way, at the right speed.

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!

## WHAT YOU'LL DO

Technical leadership & architecture

- 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
- Establish engineering practices and standards that will scale as the team grows from a handful of engineers to a full organization

Hands-on engineering

- Champion AI-tool fluency across the team, using tools like Claude Code as force multipliers
- This is a building role, not a meetings role
- Make key technical decisions across backend services, data infrastructure, and developer tooling
- 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

Cross-functional leadership

- Be a true partner to the Head of Research and Head of Science — this is not a hand-off relationship, but tight collaborative loops
- Work in close alignment with product to translate user needs and requirements into engineering priorities
- Translate complex technical tradeoffs into clear, actionable guidance for technical and non-technical stakeholders alike

People & culture

- Recruit, hire, and mentor a world-class engineering team across backend, frontend, infrastructure, and security
- Build a culture where shipping fast (excellence), learning continuously (curiosity), and being good humans (kindness) can coexist
- Foster an environment of intellectual humility, open source contribution, and AI-native development practices

## WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

## REQUIRED

- Significant experience building and leading engineering teams at early-stage or high-growth companies
- Genuine fluency with AI coding tools: you already use them daily, to solve real problems, not just experimentally
- 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

## PREFERRED

- 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 ML infrastructure, vector search, or document processing pipelines (added bonus for experience in research/academia)
- Familiarity with auth systems (e.g. OAuth) and observability tooling

## About Valency Systems Inc.

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Valency Systems Inc. builds a people-centered, AI-accelerated research platform that connects frontier LLMs to tens of millions of scientific papers and preprints, enabling grounded Q&A and discovery.
- **Entity Type**: Private, venture-backed (stage not disclosed)
- **Headquarters**: Berkeley, California, USA (implied by founder affiliations and job postings)
- **Founded**: Not publicly disclosed (the company announced its public launch in mid-2026 via a "Hello World" blog post)
- **Founders**: Josh Bloom (CEO, Co-founder) and Ryan Anderson (COO, Co-founder)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: AI-powered scientific research infrastructure, SaaS/API for research discovery
- **Target customers**: Researchers in academia, national laboratories, government agencies, and industry R&D teams; also applicable to policymakers, investors, and science journalists
- **Mission or purpose**: To create a home for people-centered, AI-accelerated research—keeping AI grounded in the real scientific record, not hallucinations

## Products & Services
- **[Valency Bond](https://valency.io)**: A model context protocol (MCP) service that gives LLMs (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, etc.) structured access to an embeddings-indexed corpus of tens of millions of research papers and preprints (coverage from 1965 to present, updated within hours of publication). Includes semantic search, citation graph tools, and 37+ MCP tools for targeted queries, reading list generation, and collaboration discovery.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (private company)
- **Key Metric – Total Funding**: Not disclosed, but confirmed as "backed by venture capital"
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not named publicly; early users include researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and other national labs, academia, and industry
- **Growth Signals**: The company is actively hiring (multiple roles posted), has a public waitlist for Valency Bond, and has received early positive testimonials from senior scientists at LBNL. The platform indexes tens of millions of papers and grows daily.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Grounded in real research**: Valency Bond directly connects LLMs to the actual scientific record, eliminating hallucinations from outdated or fabricated citations.
- **Freshness**: Papers are indexed within hours of publication, not months or years—critical for fast-moving fields.
- **Token-efficient & fast**: Designed for low latency and high throughput, making it practical for LLM agents and interactive use.
- **Partnership with domain experts**: Built in collaboration with researchers at leading national laboratories, ensuring the tool meets real scientific workflows.

## Strategic Focus
- **Current priorities**: Expanding the Valency Bond platform, onboarding more institutional and individual users, and building out the team. The company is focused on enabling AI-accelerated discovery while keeping humans in the loop ("people-centered").
- **Direction for growth**: Likely targeting deeper integrations with LLMs, expanding coverage to more preprint servers and journals, and serving enterprise/government clients who need secure, on-premises versions.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture highlights**: A science-first, AI-forward startup co-founded by a UC Berkeley professor (astronomy/AI) and a former IBM CTO. Emphasis on human-centered design and rigorous grounding in research.
- **Remote/hybrid/office policy**: Not explicitly stated, but one job posting is for "AMER" (Americas) time zone and the company is based in Berkeley, suggesting a remote-friendly or hybrid model.
- **Notable perks or engineering culture**: Early-stage environment with direct impact on product direction; opportunity to work at the intersection of AI, scientific infrastructure, and user experience. The team is described as "wonderful and talented" and is actively growing.

## Sources
1. [valency.io](https://valency.io/)
2. [blog.valency.io/posts/hello-world/](https://blog.valency.io/posts/hello-world/)
3. [linkedin.com/posts/ryananderson_...](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ryananderson_big-news-ive-co-founded-a-startup-called-activity-7457858498870132736-F6Ce)
4. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/valency](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/valency)

## Other roles at Valency Systems Inc.

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- [Marketing Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/marketing-manager-valency-systems-inc-berkeley-tx7tqv1h6r8j) — Berkeley, CA
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