---
title: 'Open Application — Shape Your Role at Valency at Valency Systems Inc.'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/open-application-shape-your-role-at-valency-valency-systems-inc-berkeley-6b4e5hbtheja'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-08'
---

# Open Application — Shape Your Role at Valency at Valency Systems Inc.

- **Company:** Valency Systems Inc.
- **Location:** Berkeley, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-05-09
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-08
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/valency/cb376539-f9f7-49c1-a310-cd7ad93cdd13

## Job description

DON’T SEE YOUR ROLE LISTED?

Pick your own.

Valency is building the foundation for research that puts people first and runs at the speed AI now allows. We're small and deliberate, and we don't always know what we need until we meet the person who brings it.

If the mission resonates and you have a point of view on where you'd fit, tell us. The role doesn't have to exist yet.

## HOW IT WORKS

Send us your background and a short note on where you'd contribute. Engineering, research, design, operations, comms, something we haven't thought of. We read every submission. When the shape of what you sent matches a need, we reach out.

## WHAT WE'RE BUILDING

Valency indexes tens of millions of research papers and makes them queryable in real-time, for researchers and for the AI systems they increasingly rely on. People stay at the center. The old stack wasn't built for this.

## WHO TENDS TO DO WELL HERE

- You think in systems and notice when foundations are wrong.
- You're drawn to hard problems in science, AI, or knowledge infrastructure.
- You hold a high bar for quality without getting stuck on it.
- You communicate clearly when things are ambiguous.
- You like early-stage work, where what you build stays yours.

We value depth over credentials. We're a hybrid team based in Berkeley, CA that comes together in office 3 days a week.

## WHAT TO SEND US

In addition to the application form, please also send us:

- Resume or short bio — enough to understand your background
- A short note on what draws you to Valency and the role you'd write for yourself
- Anything else that shows your work

Skip the cover letter

## A FEW THINGS WORTH KNOWING

- We're early. Joining now means your work shapes the product directly.
- We don't have every answer yet. The good candidates tend to be comfortable with ambiguity.
- We move slowly on hires. We also don’t ghost.

## 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.

- [Technical Product Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/technical-product-manager-valency-systems-inc-berkeley-tt5twtphr4np) — Berkeley, CA
- [GTM Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/gtm-engineer-valency-systems-inc-berkeley-z0d9g2d5h8nz) — Berkeley, CA
- [Marketing Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/marketing-manager-valency-systems-inc-berkeley-tx7tqv1h6r8j) — Berkeley, CA
- [Senior Software Engineer - Backend Systems](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-backend-systems-valency-systems-inc-berkeley-x270mrx6ck03) — Berkeley, CA
- [Head of Engineering](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-engineering-valency-systems-inc-berkeley-ma0vevetyrjb) — Berkeley, CA
- [Senior AI-Native DevOps / Operations Engineer (AMER)](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-ai-native-devops-operations-engineer-amer-valency-systems-inc-berkeley-rfy3bfvbyvt9) — Berkeley, CA
- [Head of Research](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-research-valency-systems-inc-berkeley-90ak2p6m36sw) — Berkeley, CA