Job Description
Job Description
At Pylon, we’re a small team building a very ambitious product in the mortgage space.
At this early stage, we’re looking for engineers who can see the opportunity of what we’re building towards and want to have a hand in shaping both the product and the technical foundation beneath it.
We're in search of people who thrive on hard, open-ended problems and who can operate with both autonomy and influence. If you’re someone who enjoys diving deep, thinking rigorously, and helping others do the same, Pylon Engineering could be a great fit.
About you
You:
-
Are deeply technical. Whether it’s squeezing performance, modeling domain logic, or designing fault-tolerant systems, you’re excited to dig in and sweat the details.
-
See the big picture. You understand systems, not just code. You think about tradeoffs, long-term consequences, and the shape of the architecture years from now, not just whether the tests pass.
-
Push the envelope. You look for opportunities to level up the team’s tools, abstractions, and ways of thinking. You introduce structure where needed and know when to leave things flexible.
-
Are confident you can learn quickly. Mortgage is complex, our platform is complex, good software engineering is complex. You’ve got to have an attitude that you can absorb it, get on top of it, and build something better than what came before.
-
Thrive in ambiguity. You’re comfortable charting a course without a detailed map. You make informed decisions under uncertainty, and you're able to bring others along.
-
Care about outcomes. You want to understand the user and the business just as much as the code. You measure your work by its real-world impact.
-
Love strong typing. We're a team full of people who love Haskell and Rust (and Idris!) and take pride in pushing Typescript to its limits.
About the Team
What we’re not:
Building a CRUD app:
We’re building a platform that’s only possible due to deep technology investments and thinking hard from first principles. Cargo-culting what’s come before won’t be sufficient.
If you’re looking to do mostly plumbing / lego piece assembling, Pylon may be very frustrating for you
An LLM wrapper:
Mortgage is a sprawling mess of problems, and there isn't one tool that solves every one of them. We use LLMs, but we've reached for tools in multiple disciplines like mixed-integer linear optimization and programming language research.
An easy job:
We’re building a lot of things from the ground up for the first time. Working at Pylon is like a research project where you have to ship to intelligent, opinionated customers regularly.
It’s basically guaranteed you’ll be handed a task that is too difficult for you to do. You might fail sometimes. You might have no idea where to start. Our team leans heavily on each other, but there’s no getting around the difficulties.
What we are:
A small team:
We don’t have an army of engineers. If you find something is broken, you are probably the best one to fix it
All the code we write has to punch above its weight in maintainability and toil reduction
If you have a good idea, you have much more ability to put it into action than at a large company
We need generalists: Specialization is for big companies that already have everything figured out. If you’re smart, flexible and like getting into everything, we want you.
Working in a regulated space:
Mortgage is regulated both federally and at the state level. We move fast, but breaking things isn’t an option.
About the Job
Job title: Staff Software Engineer
Stock options: Own a piece of the company and we all win together
Benefits: Health insurance, 401K, dental, etc.
Our technology stack:
We don’t require that you’ve worked with any of these technologies before—this is just our stack for your reference:
-
TypeScript front and backend
-
Web Components
-
GraphQL
-
PostgreSQL
-
NestJS web framework
-
Nx build system
-
Sagittarius
-
AWS stack using CDK for declarative infrastructure
General philosophy: Monolith until it hurts. If we can do something without introducing a new service, we will.
As a Staff Engineer, you’ll:
-
Lead architecture and technical direction across major parts of the system
-
Identify and resolve foundational technical problems before they surface
-
Mentor and level up the rest of the engineering team
-
Take high-level, ambiguous goals and break them into shippable systems
-
Push the codebase and tooling forward so we can move faster and safer over time
-
Influence engineering culture through code, communication, and example
About Pylon
The $13 trillion mortgage industry at the core of the American economy runs on broken assembly lines with human-powered workflows, stitched-together software, and a series of capital markets intermediates. The costs to originate are at an all time high despite foundational shifts in technology.
Pylon is rewiring mortgages from the ground up. We are building the only API-first, programmatic infrastructure that fully automates credit, compliance, capital, and operations. For the first time, originators can build and scale mortgage businesses entirely through software, not people. Our team comes from Stripe, Better, and Affirm, and we are backed by Conversion Capital, QED, Citi, Fifth Wall, Peter Thiel, and the founders of Ramp, Mercury, Blend, and others.