Backend Engineer, API

About Pylon

Pylon America’s $13T mortgage market is a critical financial system. It supports the middle class and enables wealth accumulation for millions of families. However, unlike other financial instruments, mortgages are still assembled manually. Pylon aims to change this by creating the first vertically integrated mortgage platform that transforms origination into a single API. Publicly traded companies and major originators are already leveraging Pylon. The company is privately held and backed by notable investors including Peter Thiel, Conversion Capital, QED, Citi, Fifth Wall, and founders of Ramp, Blend, and Mercury. Pylon is a challenging environment where employees must have high agency, strong opinions, and deliver results independently.

The Team

We're seeking Back End Engineers to join our API team. We treat our GraphQL API as a product due to its importance and direct impact on multiple customers. The complexity of mortgages requires thoughtful design, documentation, and maintenance to ensure a seamless user experience. We aim to build an event-driven API that not only responds to requests but also informs users about events, reasons, and actions available. The ideal candidate will contribute to defining what a mortgage looks like in code, designing an event-driven API, making the complex feel simple, and designing for nonlinearity.

Here's What You'll Do

• Define what a mortgage is in code, expanding its capabilities beyond current representations.
• Build toward an event-driven API that responds to and informs users about events, reasons, and actions.
• Design and ship an API that makes the mortgage process impossible to get wrong, focusing on thoughtful abstractions, clear documentation, and excellent developer experience.
• Work on guided experiences that model real-world complexity without exposing it as chaos.
• Treat the API as a product surface, considering breaking changes, versioning, onboarding, and the full lifecycle of an API used by real companies.

Tech Stack

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

Who Will Succeed Here

The ideal candidate is deeply curious, willing to take ownership of features from design to deployment, and ready to tackle the toughest problems. They should have a track record of solving complex challenges and a passion for building robust, user-friendly APIs.

Location and Compensation

• Location: Palo Alto, CA
• Base Salary Range: $140,000/yr to $220,000/yr + Equity + Benefits
• Career Compensation Range: $130K - $220K