Pylon

Member of Technical Staff, API at Pylon (Palo Alto, CA)

Pylon· Palo Alto, CA· $130k–$220k·

Role details

Salary
$130k–$220k
Work type
Hybrid
Employment
Full-Time
Equity
Yes
Skills
TypeScriptGraphQLNestJSSQLPostgreSQLEvent-driven architectureTemporal.io
Benefits

Equity · Benefits

Summary

Design and build a productized GraphQL API for the mortgage platform, focusing on event-driven architecture, semantic modeling, and developer experience. The role involves defining complex mortgage flows, ensuring non-linear API behavior, and maintaining high-quality code surfaces for enterprise customers.

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 Back End Engineers to join our API team. We treat our GraphQL API as a product — because it is one. Multiple customers build directly on top of it, and the quality of their experience is determined by how well we design, document, and maintain it. Mortgage is a surprisingly rich domain to model. It's path-dependent: the choices you make early in a loan constrain what's possible later. It's nonlinear: different borrower situations branch into wildly different flows. Most APIs in this space paper over that complexity. We're building one that embraces it — encoding the real shape of mortgage into a surface that's impossible to misuse and delightful to build against.

Here Is What You'll Do

  • Define what a mortgage is in code. Seriously. You'll work on semantic models that don't just represent mortgages as they exist today — they expand what a mortgage can be. This is product design at the API layer.
  • Build toward an event-driven API. We're moving to a world where our API doesn't just respond to requests — it tells you what happened, why, and what you can do next. You'll help design and ship that future.
  • Make the complex feel simple. Our API should make the mortgage process impossible to get wrong. That means thoughtful abstractions, clear documentation, and an obsessive focus on developer experience.
  • Design for nonlinearity. Mortgage flows aren't linear wizards. Our future API encodes choice, branching, and path-dependence natively. You'll work on guided experiences that model real-world complexity without exposing it as chaos.
  • Treat this as a product surface. You'll think about breaking changes, versioning, onboarding, and the full lifecycle of an API that real companies depend on.

Tech Stack

  • TypeScript
  • GraphQL (this is the product)
  • NestJS
  • SQL (PostgreSQL)
  • Temporal.io (workflow orchestration)
  • Event-driven architecture
  • AI-driven development tooling and agentic infrastructure

Who Will Succeed Here Someone who:

  • Is deeply curious
  • Wants to own features from design to development to deployment to maintenance
  • 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.

Application questions