Generalist Software Engineer

About Pylon

America’s $13T mortgage market is one of the most important financial systems in the world. It underwrites the middle class and is the mechanism through which millions of families build wealth. But while every other financial instrument has been simplified to an API call, mortgages are still assembled by hand.

We started from zero and created the first vertically integrated mortgage platform that turns origination into a single API.

Publicly traded companies and the country’s largest originators are already building on Pylon. Revenue is compounding monthly. We’re backed by Peter Thiel, Conversion Capital, QED, Citi, Fifth Wall, and the founders of Ramp, Blend, and Mercury.

Working at Pylon isn’t for those seeking comfort. The people who thrive here have high agency, strong opinions, and a track record of delivering outcomes without direction. Many of us are former founders. We move quickly, challenge each other directly, and take full ownership of results. It’s hard work, but it will be worth it.

Join us in building America’s mortgage rails.

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 building it.

We're in search of people who find difficult problems invigorating and who fit well into a high-performing team built on mutual respect and reliance. If you like pushing yourself to learn a massive amount while shipping code that has a huge impact on the end product, Pylon Engineering could be a great place for you.

About you

You:

• Have strong opinions that you’re willing to defend. We have a culture of vigorous discussion and debate on technical decisions. We’ll push you to defend your choices, and we want you to push back.

• Don't settle. Challenge yourself to frequently and consistently deliver exceptional code. If something could be better, take the initiative to improve it.

• Have great ideas, and lots of them. You should see opportunities all around you to make the code, product and infrastructure better. We’ll give you an environment where you can act on those ideas.

• Are self-motivated. You can take a goal and drive towards it without needing extensive hand-holding. The team is supportive and loves to share knowledge and advice, but there’s no time for micromanaging your work.

• Are comfortable with ambiguity. There's a million ways to do things; you should feel at ease making a decision under uncertainty while balancing competing constraints.

• 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.

• 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

• A ChatGPT 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

Basics

• Job title: Software Engineer

• Stock options: own a piece of the company and we all win together

• 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 information:

• Typescript front and backend

• Web components

• GraphQL

• PostgreSQL

• NestJS web framework

• Nx build system

• Sagittarius

• AWS stack using CDK for declarative infrastructure

  • We currently use ECS rather than Kubernetes. If you have questions about this choice and want to know more, please apply!

• General philosophy: monolith until it hurts. If we can do something without introducing a new service, we will

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.