# Valjean Clark > curious, product-y, design-y engineer Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/valjean https://vbud.dev ## Work Experience ### Software Engineer @ Sierra Jan 2023 – Present | San Francisco, California, United States For the first ~9 months, I worked on a mix of engineering, design, and product problems to stand up the first version of the product, which allowed our developers and users to build agents, review conversations, and report issues. I also worked on one of our first agents. I helped build the product from a few design partners to many paying customers (we've publicly shared reaching $100M in ARR in Nov 2025). Since then, I have focused on our Insights features. Among other things, I: - Worked with some truly excellent data platform engineers to migrate reports and other in-product features to use Clickhouse. We optimized the schema and query patterns to keep these features fast for even our largest customers (millions of conversations per month). - Improved, then ultimately deleted, various caching systems as a stop-gap before Clickhouse shipped. - Built SierraQL, a Clickhouse-inspired portable query language for customer conversations, providing a portable way to query conversations across our reporting and internal MCP tooling. - Improved our Monitors feature, which continually evaluates the performance of our agents. Customers can track the quality of their agents with built-in and custom monitors. - Helped ship our Agent Observability feature, which is a combination of business and operational alerting on top of our in-product agent analytics. ### Experiments, adventures, contracting @ ✨ Jan 2021 – Jan 2023 | San Francisco, California, United States I spent some time in the mountains, backpacking sections of the Pacific Crest Trail and the Sierra High Route. I also explored a few different software product ideas that I've had over the years. The two I worked on the most are Composer (https://vbud.dev/blog/composer) and Cairn (I haven't written about this yet). I also worked through a series of difficult knee problems (ACL tear + cartilage damage from surgical error, 4 surgeries in total), requiring lots of consultations with various expert surgeons and physical therapists. Ultimately, I had to pursue cartilage restoration surgery in Sep 2023, and I'm still working through rehabbing this complex situation. For ~9 months, I helped Anrok (https://anrok.com/) with design, product, and engineering for the first version of their product. For 3 months I contracted at Metronome. ### Head of Product Design @ LightStep Jan 2019 – Jan 2021 | San Francisco I built a capable design team from scratch given my experience working on observability products at New Relic. Designing for observability is hard, so I worked closely with the heads of product and engineering to change how we worked so that design could better participate in our various projects, and I worked with recruiting to identify profiles of designers that would be effective working on a technical product like Lightstep. I also started Lightstep's UI component library and design system, in collaboration with a designer on my team. ### Product Engineer @ LightStep Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco ### Software Engineer @ Remix Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco Completed an initiative to migrate Remix's Transit UI from Leaflet to MapboxGL. Remix is a complex drawing tool built on top of a map, so performance was a large focus. I optimized both React and MapboxGL performance as part of this effort. I also worked on two new features for Remix's Transit planning product: 1) search 2) v2 of Remix's Jane isochrone. ### Staff Software Engineer @ New Relic, Inc. Jan 2018 – Jan 2018 | San Francisco Tech lead on a team migrating APM to New Relic One (New Relic's new UI platform at the time). ### Engineering Manager @ New Relic, Inc. Jan 2017 – Jan 2018 | San Francisco I managed 3 teams over the course of 12 months - a platform team and 2 product UI teams. - Gave the backend team air cover as we worked through a rapid increase in usage of our product. - Learned how to hire great engineers and improved our hiring process. - Successfully worked through difficult performance management scenarios (and learned a lot about what I can do better next time). ### Staff Software Engineer @ New Relic, Inc. Jan 2016 – Jan 2017 | San Francisco I designed and built much of the UI of New Relic Infrastructure - an infrastructure monitoring product that New Relic launched in Nov 2016. Infrastructure quickly became New Relic's #2 revenue source after their flagship APM product. I primarily contributed to the UI, in addition to some services. - Built a large, complex, responsive single-page app from the ground up. - Started the company’s first successful shared UI component and tooling libraries. - Work closely with design, product management, and other engineers to build new features. - Mentored new engineers and participated in the hiring process. - Gave talks at company offsites and unconferences (topics include CSS for shared components, how engineers and designers work together, shared components and tooling) ### Senior Software Engineer @ New Relic, Inc. Jan 2015 – Jan 2016 | San Francisco ### Software Developer @ Intel Corporation Jan 2013 – Jan 2015 | Portland, Oregon Metropolitan Area Decided to pivot my career from design to engineering. I continued to play the role of a designer on the team, but spent the majority of my time writing code. I worked on an internal tools team building modern web applications. - Built shared front-end components, tooling, and generators for company-wide use. - Built a reusable JSONAPI-compatible adapter for our Node.js services. - Designed an incident management tool. - Built the UI and services of a registry for discovery of reusable code/components. - Trained interaction designers and software developers on teams across the company in web development practices. - Designed, researched, and built custom data visualizations to show hardware development progress for chipset releases. - Organized and led an internal hack-a-thon and repped Intel at external hackathons. ### Interaction Designer @ Intel Corporation Jan 2012 – Jan 2013 | Portland, Oregon Area Designed data visualizations and performed user research for internal tools. ### Co-Owner @ ITS Jan 2008 – Jan 2012 | Reno, NV I ran an IT business with my dad to pay for college. - Worked with clients to deploy and maintain their hardware and software. - Learned to manage many Microsoft business products, such as Office to Server 2008. - Created websites. - Convinced as many clients as possible to use Google Apps instead of Microsoft Office. ## Education ### Masters in Human-Computer Interaction Uppsala University Jan 2010 – Jan 2012 ### Bachelor of Engineering - BE in Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering, Mathematics, Game Engineering, Spanish University of Nevada, Reno Jan 2005 – Jan 2010 ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/valjeanclark - Portfolio: https://vbud.dev --- Source: https://flows.cv/valjean JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/valjean/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-25