Founding Engineer

Founding Engineer
Valent | New York, NY | In person, 5 days a week | Full-time

About Valent

America is rebuilding its industrial base. Batteries, magnets, critical minerals, semiconductors, and defense systems are being built here again, with more capital and stricter rules behind them than at any point in decades. FEOC, §45X, DFARS, NDAA §842, and Buy American all ask the same question: where did this come from, and can you prove it?

Most manufacturers can't answer it. Their supply chain data lives in supplier emails, certificate PDFs, spreadsheets, and ERPs, scattered across tiers nobody has mapped.

Valent connects supplier intelligence, market requirements, and operations in one platform. We map every material to its supplier, manufacturing site, and country of origin down to the sub-tier, tie every COA, MTR, and CoC to the lot it certifies, and check bills of materials against the requirements that decide which contracts and credits manufacturers can win. We build for every player in the chain: government, primes, manufacturers, suppliers, and importers. We're backed by a16z Speedrun.

The role

You'll be one of Valent's first engineers, working directly with the founders. This is a forward-deployed role: you'll spend time on plant floors and supplier calls as well as in the codebase. You'll own customer deployments end to end, from ingesting supplier documents and ERP data to shipping what each deployment needs, then turn what you learn in the field into core product.

What you'll do

• Build the document and data pipelines that turn supplier certificates, declarations, mill test reports, and BOMs into structured, auditable provenance records

• Build agents that monitor supplier communications, catch upstream changes (material sources, processes, facilities), and recommend next steps

• Encode regulatory logic (FEOC, §45X domestic content, DFARS specialty metals and magnet provisions, Buy American) against real bills of materials

• Own customer deployments: scope data, build integrations with ERPs, inboxes, and drives, and get customers live fast

• Build evaluation and review tooling so every output traces back to its sources and holds up under audit

• Shape the architecture, engineering culture, and hiring as the team grows

You might be a fit if you

• Have 4+ years shipping production software, ideally including time as an early engineer at a startup

• Have built with LLMs in production: extraction, retrieval, agents, and evals

• Work comfortably across the stack (TypeScript, Python, Postgres, cloud infrastructure)

• Like talking to users and can earn the trust of supply chain VPs and quality engineers alike

• Care about correctness, because our outputs end up in audits, tax filings, and defense contracts

• Want real ownership and move fast without waiting for specs

Bonus points

• Experience in manufacturing, supply chain, defense, energy, or other regulated industries

• Forward-deployed, solutions, or implementation engineering experience

• Document AI, OCR, or entity resolution at scale

• Experience with ERP data (SAP, NetSuite, Oracle, Plex, Epicor)

Why Valent

• A mission that matters: reshoring and securing America's industrial base

• Founding-level equity and real ownership over the product and the company

• Hard problems with no off-the-shelf answers: messy documents, multi-tier supply graphs, and regulations that keep changing

• A direct line to customers, investors, and policymakers in DC

Compensation

$170,000 to $220,000 base salary, plus equity. Medical, dental, and vision coverage.

How to apply

Send your resume and links to things you've built. Tell us about a system you shipped where getting the answer right really mattered.

Valent is an equal opportunity employer.