
Infrastructure Engineer, Foundation at Pylon (Palo Alto, CA)
Pylon· Palo Alto, CA· $140k–$220k·
Role details
Equity · Benefits
Summary
The Infrastructure Engineer ensures system stability and developer productivity for Pylon's mortgage platform. Responsibilities include designing high-availability infrastructure, building tooling to reduce build flakiness, maintaining code quality, and implementing monitoring systems. The role requires deep curiosi...
Job description
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.
THE TEAM
We're looking for Infra Engineers to join our Foundation team. This team keeps the platform stable and the developers productive. That's it. Two jobs, both critical.
We'll be honest: we're scaling fast, and our infrastructure needs to keep up. We need people who've seen systems under pressure and know how to make them reliable — not just "works on my machine" reliable, but "processes millions of dollars in mortgage transactions" reliable.
Your customers aren't borrowers — they're the engineers sitting next to you. When you make deploys faster, monitoring clearer, or incidents rarer, the entire company ships better software. The feedback loop is instant: your teammates will tell you, loudly, when something is great or when something is broken.
HERE IS WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Keep highly available systems highly available. We process mortgage transactions that can't go down. You'll design, monitor, and improve the infrastructure that makes that possible.
- Make developers more productive. Slow builds, flaky tests, painful deploys — these are your enemies. You'll build tooling and infrastructure that lets the rest of the team move fast with confidence.
- Be a groundskeeper of the codebase. You'll help maintain code quality, teach best practices, and mentor junior engineers. The Foundation team sets the standard for how we build software.
- Fight fires and prevent them. When something breaks, you'll help fix it. More importantly, you'll build the systems and practices that keep things from breaking in the first place.
- Work with instant feedback. Your customers are your coworkers. They'll tell you what's working and what's not — no surveys, no quarterly reviews, just direct, honest feedback every day.
TECH STACK
- AWS (our cloud home)
- TypeScript
- Graphite (stacked PRs and developer workflow)
- Honeycomb (observability)
- GitHub Codespaces (development environments)
- Temporal.io temporal.io (workflow orchestration)
- SQL (PostgreSQL)
- GraphQL
- AI-driven development tooling and agentic infrastructure
WHO WILL SUCCEED HERE
Someone who:
- Is deeply curious
- Wants to won features from design to development to deployment to maintence
- Is willing to put the work in to solve the hardest of problems
Location: Palo Alto , CA Base Salary Range: $140,000/yr to $220,000/yr + Equity + Benefits
Why work at Pylon
- High Ownership, High Impact: Engineering teams own entire systems, not tickets. Described as "not a typical fintech company" — opinionated, fast-shipping, and willing to tackle "the hardest problem in tech" pylonlending.com.
- Substantial Equity: Employees receive meaningful ownership in the company ("be a founder, not just an employee") pylonlending.com.
- Perks: Health, dental, and vision coverage; 401(k) and life insurance; home financing support (industry-leading rates); financial planning support.
- Work Policy: Hybrid roles (e.g., New York, Palo Alto) and remote options available depending on position. Offices in New York (HQ) and Palo Alto builtin.com.
- Culture: "This will be hard" — they explicitly seek people who thrive on messy, real-world problems with real stakes and regulatory complexity. Many ex-Stripe, ex-Better, and ex-Mercury engineers pylonlending.com.