Valency Systems Inc.
Technical Product Manager
- Location
- Berkeley, CA, US
- Arrangement
- Hybrid
- Employment type
- Full-time
- Level
- Manager
- Posted
- 31 July 2026 (about 2 months ago)
Checked about a month agoApplications go to the employer, never to RoleSprint
About this role
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 decisions
- Help 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.
Work location
- Berkeley, CA, US
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About this listing
Published on Ashby under the board identifier Valency, which is the name the employer’s own job board carries. RoleSprint has not verified the company’s registered or trading name, so it is shown exactly as published rather than tidied up.
RoleSprint is not the employer and not a recruiter. Applications are made on the employer’s own site and never reach us; what RoleSprint does is help you decide whether a role is worth your time and prepare for it if it is.
Published 31 July 2026, last checked about a month ago. A posting stops being advertised here 90 days after the employer published it, and one the employer takes down is marked closed rather than quietly removed.