Lead Product Manager, API Platform

Pylon•New York, NY

About The Position

Pylon is hiring a Lead Product Manager to own its API platform, including the domain model, API design, roadmap, quality bar, and developer experience. The API is the core product through which customers originate loans, build integrations, and connect agents to Pylon. Built on GraphQL, the platform must make mortgage complexity understandable to developers and support a consistent approach across product and engineering teams. The role will define how mortgage is represented in software, establish standards for schema design and API evolution, and ensure compliance is built into the API. The Lead PM will work closely with engineering, the Agent Platform team, go-to-market, and Account Management; contribute code alongside engineers; and help customers and developers succeed. The position requires becoming a trusted mortgage expert over time. The person must live in or be willing to relocate to Palo Alto, California, or New York City.

Requirements

At least 7 years of experience in software, including at least 4 years as a product manager for API or developer platform products.
Experience owning and scaling public APIs used by developers at significant scale.
Excellent domain-modeling skills and experience turning complex real-world domains into clear entities, relationships, and state machines.
Deep knowledge of GraphQL, including schema design, nullability, connection-based pagination, error modeling, federation, and schema evolution and deprecation.
Knowledge of API design beyond GraphQL, including REST, webhooks and events, idempotency, OAuth and scoped API keys, and rate limiting.
Ability to write code and commit to a production codebase, prototype against an API, and discuss architecture in depth with engineers.
Experience building developer experience such as documentation, SDKs, sandboxes, and developer portals.
Experience building 0-to-1 enterprise software in a regulated industry.
Ability to write SQL and define metrics for API adoption and developer experience.
Must live in or be willing to relocate to Palo Alto, California, or New York City.
Strong judgment and prioritization, willingness to defend decisions and change course when warranted, and ability to work effectively with internal teams, customer engineers, partners, and vendors.

Nice To Haves

An engineering background.
Mortgage or fintech infrastructure experience, or familiarity with industry standards such as MISMO.

Responsibilities

Set API strategy across Pylon so product and engineering teams build toward one consistent platform, and help grow the team as it scales.
Own the API roadmap and quality bar, with developers as the primary customers.
Own the mortgage domain model, defining core entities, relationships, and lifecycle states and maintaining it as products, channels, and regulations expand.
Lead GraphQL schema design, including types, queries, mutations, subscriptions, pagination, errors, and naming, and set standards for other teams.
Run API design reviews to keep new fields and mutations consistent and maintainable.
Decide how the schema is versioned, deprecated, and evolved without breaking customers.
Own developer experience, including documentation, API explorer, SDKs, sandboxes, webhooks, and onboarding; improve the time it takes a new customer to get a first loan through the API.
Work with engineering on performance, reliability, authentication and permissions, rate limiting, and observability.
Write and ship code, commit schema and API changes alongside engineers, and build against the API to understand its usability.
Build compliance into the API model, including required data, disclosures, audit trails, and permissions.
Work closely with the Agent Platform team to make the API usable by agents as well as people.
Work with Go-to-Market and Account Management to scope integrations, support deals, and help customers succeed.
Use AI in day-to-day work.
Become a trusted mortgage expert on the team over time.