Staff Generalist Engineer
At Pylon, we’re a small team building a very ambitious product in the mortgage space. We've got product-market fit and are looking to scale what we've built
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
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.