Senior Product Engineer

At Pylon, we're a small team building a very ambitious product in the mortgage space.

About the Job

The Role

• Full-stack ownership: You'll work across our entire stack: web components with Lit, React, GraphQL API, NestJS backend, TypeORM for data modeling. You own features end-to-end.
• Customer-facing impact: What you build directly affects how MLOs do their jobs. You need to care about the quality of the interface and the user experience.
• Navigating ambiguity: You'll often be handed the least-defined problems on the team. "We need a float-to-lock workflow" might be your starting point. You figure out how to integrate with backend systems, what the UI should look like, and how to break down the work.
• Leveraging the platform: Other teams build the deep infrastructure and platform capabilities. Your job is to use those tools effectively to ship product quickly, while surfacing when something needs a deeper solution.
• Setting direction: You're joining a team with strong junior and mid-level engineers. Your technical decisions, code patterns, and approach to problem-solving will shape how the team builds.

What We're Looking For

Technical:

Strong full-stack web development skills. Prior experience with our specific stack (Lit, NestJS, TypeORM) isn't required, but you should be comfortable with similar technologies and able to learn quickly.

Mindset:

You don't need to know anything about mortgages coming in. You need to be smart, curious, and motivated to learn complex domains quickly.

Basics

• Job title: Senior Product Engineer
• Stock options: own a piece of the company and we all win together
• Health insurance, 401K, dental, etc.

Our technology stack:

• Web components with Lit
• React
• GraphQL
• TypeScript
• NestJS
• TypeORM
• PostgreSQL

About you

Ship with urgency and quality.

You understand that types aren't red tape, they're how you move fast without breaking things. You can balance speed with craft, knowing when to be pragmatic and when to invest in doing it right.

Have product sense.

You sweat the details of interaction design and user experience. You work closely with product and design, but you have opinions about what makes software feel good to use. You notice when something is clunky and you fix it.

Think end-to-end.

You're comfortable across the full stack, from database schemas to API design to frontend components, and you understand how decisions at each layer affect the others. You can own a feature from conception to deployment.

Can see the forest and the trees.

You balance shipping customer value with building maintainable systems. You know when to surface that something needs a deeper platform solution versus when to solve it at the application layer.

Shape how we build.

As a senior engineer on the product team, you'll influence technical direction, set patterns for others to follow, and help less experienced engineers develop their skills through clear communication and thoughtful code review.

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 of a fast moving startup.

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're generalists: hyper-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 Pylon