Hi everyone, I’m Alex Dao. I’m a Senior Engineering Manager at Valon and work across a number of teams covering mortgage servicing and growing new lines of business. I’ve been at Valon for about four years now, and I’ve had the privilege of seeing first-hand how a tiny startup with almost no users can grow into the industry challenger it is today. Although my background is in software engineering, I’ve always had a deep interest in our financial system and how it works. Valon has been the perfect place for me to dive into a part of it and figure out how to make it better for everyone.

Like everybody else at the company, my overall mission is to make sure we’re doing right by our homeowners and driving our business forward. In my role, this could mean figuring out the best way teams should work together, defining a clear direction and scope of projects we take on, reviewing technical designs, supporting team members in their careers, and generally just doing everything I can to contribute.

What drew you to Valon’s mission of transforming homeownership and mortgage servicing?

Honestly, I didn’t know anything about mortgage servicing before joining Valon. The more I learned about how the industry worked and how servicing operated though, the more I grew convinced that there was a real opportunity to build something significantly better than what exists today. Even after working in this space for many years, I’m still routinely surprised at how fundamentally broken and inefficient the industry really is. What initially drew me to Valon, and what continues to get me excited and motivated, is seeing how focused and committed everybody at the company is towards making that change happen. We’ve changed a lot since we were a tiny startup, but what hasn’t changed is our culture and belief in what matters for building a great product.

Why do you believe Valon is uniquely positioned to disrupt the mortgage industry?

It takes a balance of both a new first principles approach and deep domain expertise to disrupt an industry as complex and important as the mortgage industry. Valon has assembled a team with a diverse range of experiences – from people I’m normally used to working with in tech to industry vets deeply knowledgeable about mortgage servicing. No matter the background though, what doesn’t change is the talent bar we expect and the impact each person delivers. It’s what’s necessary to accomplish our mission.

How does working on Valon’s tech stack help in addressing the complexities of the mortgage industry?

Our tech stack (from front to back) is React, TypeScript, GQL, Python, and MySQL running on GCP. One of our core guiding principles is that our choice of technology is not our competitive advantage. Sure, just the fact that we’re a modern tech company means we are by default much different than the rest of the industry. On a deeper level, what really matters is the design principles and patterns that we follow. We care a lot about building an absolutely correct system that is resilient to failures, scalable to all loans in the market, and extensible to any new business opportunity. We want to choose “boring” technology so that we can spend all of our time working on what’s actually important – solving the really hard business problems around modeling mortgages, money movement, etc. 

A second guiding principle of Valon is that improving our engineering productivity is one of the highest leverage things we can do. You can see this in how much work we put into things like:

• Trustworthy, reliable, and automated CI/CD and releng
• Automated new hire and development environment setup
• Extensive documentation
• In-house CLI for single command database migrations, package management, codegen, etc.
• And so much more

We want every engineer to feel like they have the resources and tooling of a large tech company.

What future projects or developments at Valon are you most excited about?

We’re at a really exciting inflection point in Valon’s history right now. In the past, a lot of our survival as a startup was dependent on things outside our control. We had to be reactive and flexible to rapid changes in stuff like the macroeconomic environment, business partnerships, and regulatory requirements. These are still important, but for the most part, it doesn’t keep us up at night anymore, because we’re confident in our system being able to profitably handle millions of mortgages at scale.

Nowadays, I think about what the optimal path is for maximizing our market ceiling. Should we expand into servicing new loan types beyond mortgages? Do we start developing new products for our existing users like property insurance? How do we make sure that we’re consistently delivering more value to our customers? What’s really exciting to me is that it’s all within our control and up for grabs. We just have to go out and build it.

What’s your favorite part of Valon’s working environment?

Engineers at Valon work remotely from all over the country. We’re serious about hiring the best people and that means we don’t limit where people can work from. That being said, we know that in-person interaction is also a highly effective way to deeply collaborate with someone, build relationships with teammates, and seek out user feedback. 

I live in the Bay Area and regularly travel to meet up with my team. Our policy is pretty generous, but I think it speaks to the underlying principle around trust at Valon – we want you to do your best work, and you are empowered to make decisions to do so.

Anything else about yourself you’d like to add?

I love being active outdoors. In the winter, you can find me every weekend on the mountain at my home resort of Palisades trying to get better at freeskiing. I also like to ball, play poker, and work my way through the IMDB Top 250.

If anything about Valon sounds interesting to you, I’d love to chat with you! My email is alex@valon.com.

If you’re interested in joining Alex as part of Valon’s team, check out our open career opportunities.