Technical Product Manager

Valency Systems Inc.; Berkeley (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k) with matching

Job summary

Valency is seeking a product leader to turn strategy into execution across Bond and the broader platform, balancing enterprise, national-lab needs with an open-platform, product-led growth approach.

You'll translate technical architecture into specs, prioritize requirements from conversations with national labs and enterprise teams, and help stand up the product function as an early PM hire.

Qualifications

• Fluency in AI concepts including grounding, retrieval, and evaluation.
• Excellent written communication and ability to turn depth into a roadmap.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end roadmap across Bond and new products.
• Translate architecture into clear specs with engineering.
• Work with GTM on segmentation and ICP to prioritize requirements.
• Resolve product risks and establish trust safeguards for open-access products.

Skills

AI fluency

Written communication

Product management

Cross-functional leadership

Tools

MCP protocol

REST API

Data pipelines

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 decisionsHelp 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.