Valon Externship Program

About the Company

Valon is building the AI-native operating system for regulated finance, starting with mortgage servicing.

We're a Series C company backed by a16z, transforming industries that others have written off as too complex to innovate.

Rather than build on top of broken legacy systems, we took a different approach: we built and operate our own mortgage servicing business managing $110+ billion in loans. This wasn't the end goal, it was how we deeply understood the complexity needed to build software that actually works in regulated industries.

The results speak for themselves. We've transformed mortgage servicing from a 0% margin business into 60%+ margins while dramatically improving customer experience. Major enterprise contracts are now deploying across the industry.

ValonOS is our unified platform that makes every process structured and programmable and it is perfectly positioned for the AI era. When everything flows through one system with rich data, AI agents don't just automate tasks, they continuously improve entire operations. Mortgage servicing is just the beginning of our vision to transform regulated industries and beyond.

About the Program

The Valon Externship is a three-day, in-person program in our NYC office for a small group of builders aged 16–21 — high schoolers, college students, gap-year kids, self-taught, dropouts. The kind of people who'd be coding tonight regardless of whether anyone was watching.

You won't be shadowing from across the room. You'll sit next to the engineers building Valon's internal AI tooling — agents, evals, custom CLIs, MCP servers, the whole stack — use the same tools they use every day, pick a project you can push hard on, and demo what you built on Friday.

This isn't a tour, a panel, or a structured curriculum. It's three days of real building with the people who built the tools. The only deliverable is a demo.

Location: New York, NY (in-person, all three days).

What You'll Do

• Spin up on the same AI tooling Valon engineers ship with — Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, MCP servers, and Valon's internal tooling — on Day 1.

• Pick a project that matters to you. An agentic workflow, an eval harness, an internal tool, a developer-experience problem — your call.

• Build alongside the engineers who built Valon's AI tooling stack. Pair, ask anything, watch how they actually work.

• Demo what you built to the team on Day 3.

• Stay close after the program ends — strong demos lead to follow-up conversations with Valon engineering and recruiting.

Ideal Background

• You ship. Projects, repos, side businesses, research, weird experiments — anything that shows you can take an idea from zero to something real.

• You're already AI-native. You're using coding agents and modern AI tooling daily, not for the first time. You have opinions about which ones are actually good.

• You can talk about your work. You can explain what you built, what broke, and what you learned. Without slides.

• You bring your own ideas. You have a list of things you'd build if you had the time, the tokens, and the right people next to you. We're handing you all three.

• You're 16–21 at the time of the program. High school, college, gap year, self-taught, or none of the above — all welcome.

You do not need an internship pedigree, a CS degree, or any specific coursework. You need proof you make things.

The Basics

• Paid stipend. Externs are paid for the three days. The amount is shared with shortlisted applicants.

• Travel and housing. Not covered by default. If getting to NYC is a blocker, tell us in your application and we'll see what we can do.

• Under 18. Parent or guardian consent is part of the application process.

• In-person. All three days are at Valon's NYC office. There is no remote option for this program.

• Dates are fixed. July 8–10, 2026. The program runs as a cohort, so partial attendance isn't possible.

Throughout the interview process, please remember that emails will only be from valon.com email addresses. We will never ask for any personally identifiable information during the interview process itself. Please reach out to [email protected] if you have any requests to verify the authenticity of an outreach.

Valon is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to diversity and inclusion in the workplace. We prohibit discrimination and harassment of any kind based on race, color, sex, religion, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, genetic information, pregnancy, or any other protected characteristic as outlined by federal, state, or local laws. Valon makes hiring decisions based solely on qualifications, merit, and business needs at the time.