Senior Product Engineer

Pylon•Palo Alto, CA

47d

About The Position

At Pylon, we're a small team (11+) building a very ambitious product in the mortgage space. At this early stage, we're looking for full stack product engineers who can see the opportunity of what we're building towards and want to have a hand in building it. 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's Engineering Team could be a great place for you. You'll be joining our product team (FTL), building the interface that mortgage loan officers use daily. Think of it as an interface for managing loans and driving deals forward.

Requirements

Years of Experience: 6-10 years of software engineering, or 4+ years if you've been on the front lines of an exceptional product organization. You've held roles as a tech lead, staff or principal.
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.
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 Strong Opinions: 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.

Responsibilities

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.