I’m Hassan, a Staff Engineer on our Banking team. I’ve been at Valon for four years, first working across a variety of teams that dealt with money and then founding the Banking team to provide platform support to solve common problems faced by all of our “money teams.” As a Staff Engineer, I provide architectural and design support across a number of teams, helping guide how we think about things like double entry accounting and reconciliation. Before joining Valon, I worked at Meta on their locations data team and at AWS on Route53 DNS.
What drew you to Valon?
The business has always been structured in a way where the success of the company is in the hands of the builders here. The product market fit and metrics for success were super clear, and by building internally for our own servicing team, there was an immediate adoption of everything we built. So although the problems seemed challenging, I loved the idea of being able to approach them knowing that if we could solve them, there would be a clear and immediate impact.
Can you share an example of a project you’ve worked on that directly impacted Valon’s mission?
One of the biggest and most complex projects I’ve worked on is building a layered approach to reconciliation—breaking the problem down into a number of different steps that can each be done independently but result in an end-to-end understanding of every dollar in and out of our accounts.
Illustrated below, the layers are structured as: external banking -> physical banking -> virtual banking -> servicing activities -> cashbook values
Our cash management system (physical + virtual banking layers) is responsible for accurately representing the cash in each account and which entity it belongs to. The physical banking system represents the actual bank accounts we operate, while the virtual banking system allows for keeping virtualized bank accounts on a per-loan basis to hold their funds isolated from other loans. The validations in these layers ensure that we are accurately representing the bank statement and breaking it into the virtual accounts at an individual level.
The next set of layers comprise our loan accounting system, where we associate the actual fund movements that occurred in the cash management system with the activity that triggered them (e.g., a loan payment or escrow disbursement). Each activity then contributes to the aggregated cashbook for a loan. One way to think about the interplay between these systems is the cash management system verifies that every dollar is accounted for, while the loan accounting systems ensure that we know what caused each movement to occur.
How has working at Valon challenged you professionally and personally?
In my prior jobs, I generally worked on “standard” technical problems, solving for super high QPS (Amazon Route53 DNS) or extremely large datasets (the Meta locations data team). Since coming to Valon, the challenges haven’t been the normal, high-scale style issues, but rather have required cleanly modeling complex, real-world entities. The goal here at Valon is to make mortgage servicing as easy and efficient as possible, which means we need to build our internal systems to be easy to understand and adapt as regulations or other things change. This type of challenge has pushed me to exercise a different axis of software engineering—much more than I ever had to before.
A big part of my work has involved going out of my comfort zone and learning about different areas; for example, taking a deep dive into accounting. For a few months, I took online accounting 101 courses and made a point to sit with our finance team and learn how they think. The goal behind this was first to learn how to think like an accountant and then to use that knowledge to better build our finance systems, making the Finance team’s life easier.
What advice would you give to someone considering joining Valon’s engineering team?
Have curiosity and learn from other disciplines here! When working on modeling these complex systems, it is valuable to deeply understand the domain first, and the best way to do that is by relying on the experts we work with. Early on, I created a Slack channel called #ask-the-experts as a place for the tech team to ask our coworkers questions and to encourage everyone to seek knowledge!
I want to give a shout-out to Trey Zimmerman, who helped me learn a lot about how to think about mortgage/business accounting, and to Kelvin Whitcher, who has a wealth of knowledge on the intricacies of modeling how Fannie Mae remittance and reporting works.
What’s your favorite part of Valon’s working environment?
One of our core values is “Reason from first principles,” and I get to experience that regularly while working at Valon. We emphasize that when working in a complex environment, many things exist because “everyone does it that way.” While that’s not always a bad thing, it’s important to understand the first principles behind something to make sure we are building with the best strategy in mind. It is great to be surrounded by others who also focus on uncovering these first principles, pushing each other to gain a deeper understanding of the domain so we can build better systems.
If you’re interested in joining Hassan as part of Valon’s team, check out our open career opportunities.
