---
title: 'Technical Product Manager at Valency Systems Inc.'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/technical-product-manager-valency-systems-inc-berkeley-tt5twtphr4np'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-15'
---

# Technical Product Manager at Valency Systems Inc.

- **Company:** Valency Systems Inc.
- **Location:** Berkeley, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-07-31
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-15
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/valency/93a4fc35-59f9-4ec6-90d9-98935fe395de

## Job description

## About Valency

Valency builds the infrastructure for AI-accelerated science — “Knowledge accelerated.” Our flagship product, Bond, is an MCP-first platform that national labs and enterprise research teams use to ground AI systems in verified, current scientific literature rather than hallucinated recall. We're actively expanding beyond Bond into new products that extend this mission, and this role will help shape what comes next. Valency sits between three audiences — skeptical academia, results-driven enterprise, and AI-forward amplifiers — and needs a product leader who can build credibility with all three.

## The Role

You'll turn product strategy into execution across Bond and the broader platform of tools we're building to accelerate scientific research, including new products still in development. We're open to mid-level or director-level candidates — scope and title will flex to match experience — but every level of this role requires genuine fluency in AI and a real interest in science and data, not just PM process. The job is to turn deep technical capability — LLM grounding, retrieval, the MCP protocol, corpus scoring — into a roadmap the market can understand, buy, and use. You'll work daily with senior management and engineering on architecture trade-offs and daily with GTM on what customers actually need, and you'll be the person who reconciles the two.

## What You'll Do

- Own the end-to-end roadmap across Bond and new products in development, balancing enterprise/national-lab requirements against open-platform, product-led growth models
- Translate technical architecture — MCP-based grounding, corpus ingestion, relevance scoring — into clear specs in direct partnership with engineering
- Work with GTM on segmentation and ICP, converting prospect and customer conversations (national labs, biotech, enterprise research teams) into prioritized requirements
- Resolve open product risks head-on, including quality-control and trust safeguards for open-access products still in development
- Represent product in design-partner and customer conversations and turn what you hear into roadmap decisions
- Help stand up the product function itself — process and documentation now, and a team over time — as one of Valency's first PM hires

## What You Bring

- Fluency in AI: you understand how modern LLM systems are built and where they break — grounding, retrieval, hallucination, evaluation — well enough to make roadmap calls, not just repeat the vocabulary
- A genuine interest in science and data — you want to understand how research actually gets produced, cited, and trusted, not just ship features for it
- 4–10+ years in product management, with direct experience shipping technical, infrastructure, or developer-facing products (scope/title will flex to mid or director level depending on experience)
- Comfort operating at the protocol/API level (MCP, REST, data pipelines) and translating that into roadmap and customer value
- Experience supporting enterprise or public-sector buyers — national labs, government, or other regulated environments — is a strong plus
- Familiarity with academic publishing or scholarly infrastructure (arXiv, PubMed, citation graphs, peer review) is highly valued
- Comfortable with ambiguity and a startup pace — no existing playbook
- Strong technical fluency: able to read and debate architecture with engineers without being the one writing the code
- Excellent written communication — specs, PRDs, and customer-facing narrative alike

## Nice to Have

- Experience with LLM-based products, retrieval-augmented generation, or AI evaluation systems
- A background in scientific research or academia, or experience building for researchers as end users
- Experience with two-sided platform dynamics — marketplace growth, user-generated content quality control

## Why Join Us

- Meaningful challenges on a product that's growing fast and reaching real users
- A small, high-trust team where your decisions have outsized impact
- A culture that values excellence and invests seriously in the people who drive it

## Compensation, Benefits & Equity

We offer a competitive a benefits, salary and equity package including a 401(k) with matching Work Authorization Candidates must be legally authorized to work in the United States.

## 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.

- [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
- [Open Application — Shape Your Role at Valency](https://feeny.ai/job/open-application-shape-your-role-at-valency-valency-systems-inc-berkeley-6b4e5hbtheja) — 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
- [Technical Product Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/technical-product-manager-quantifind-new-york-s1b40sx50zsr) — New York, NY
- [Technical Product Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/technical-product-manager-altaml-edmonton-r9z4g73fezmp) — Edmonton, Canada
- [Technical Product Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/technical-product-manager-sunnydata-uruguay-0m1h25fm8f4e) — Uruguay