Join to apply for the Staff Software Engineer, Core Platform role at Pylon 1 week ago Be among the first 25 applicants Join to apply for the Staff Software Engineer, Core Platform role at Pylon Get AI-powered advice on this job and more exclusive features. At Pylon, we’re a small team building a very ambitious product in the mortgage space.

At this early stage, we’re looking for engineers who can see the opportunity of what we’re building towards and want to have a hand in shaping both the product and the technical foundation beneath it.

We're in search of people who thrive on hard, open-ended problems and who can operate with both autonomy and influence. If you’re someone who enjoys diving deep, thinking rigorously, and helping others do the same, Pylon Engineering could be a great fit.

You

About you

Are deeply technical. Whether it’s squeezing performance, modeling domain logic, or designing fault-tolerant systems, you’re excited to dig in and sweat the details. See the big picture. You understand systems, not just code. You think about tradeoffs, long-term consequences, and the shape of the architecture years from now, not just whether the tests pass. Push the envelope. You look for opportunities to level up the team’s tools, abstractions, and ways of thinking. You introduce structure where needed and know when to leave things flexible. 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. Thrive in ambiguity. You’re comfortable charting a course without a detailed map. You make informed decisions under uncertainty, and you're able to bring others along. Care about outcomes. You want to understand the user and the business just as much as the code. You measure your work by its real-world impact. 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

An LLM 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

Job title: Principal Software Engineer

Stock options: Own a piece of the company and we all win together

Benefits: 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 reference:

TypeScript front and backend Web Components GraphQL PostgreSQL NestJS web framework Nx build system Sagittarius AWS stack using CDK for declarative infrastructure

General philosophy: Monolith until it hurts. If we can do something without introducing a new service, we will.

As a Principal Engineer, You’ll

Lead architecture and technical direction across major parts of the system Identify and resolve foundational technical problems before they surface Mentor and level up the rest of the engineering team Take high-level, ambiguous goals and break them into shippable systems Push the codebase and tooling forward so we can move faster and safer over time Influence engineering culture through code, communication, and example

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. Seniority level Seniority level Mid-Senior level Employment type Employment type Full-time Job function Job function Engineering and Information Technology Industries Technology, Information and Internet Referrals increase your chances of interviewing at Pylon by 2x Sign in to set job alerts for “Staff Software Engineer” roles. San Francisco, CA $200,000.00-$250,000.00 3 weeks ago Sr. Software Engineer - Payments Support Staff Software Engineer, Frontend (Rapid Prototyping Leader) San Francisco, CA $202,000.00-$238,000.00 5 days ago San Francisco, CA $156,000.00-$211,000.00 10 hours ago Senior / Staff Software Engineer - Computational Chemistry / Molecular Dynamics Principal Software Engineer - Computational Chemistry / Molecular Dynamics Staff Software Product Engineer, RCM (SF) San Francisco, CA $180,000.00-$220,000.00 4 weeks ago Staff Software Engineer, Demand Engineering - Slack San Francisco, CA $184,000.00-$334,600.00 1 day ago Software Engineering Technical Leader (Hybrid Remote- San Jose, CA) San Francisco, CA $198,600.00-$282,900.00 5 days ago Senior Software Engineer, Robotics & Automation Staff Software Product Engineer, RCM (SF) Redwood City, CA $140,000.00-$198,000.00 2 weeks ago Senior Robotics Software Engineer, Planning and Control San Francisco, CA $150,000.00-$240,000.00 1 month ago Staff Software Engineer, Vessel Performance Modeling Senior/Staff Motor Control Software Engineer Senior Software Engineer, Reliability & Integration (Hardware in the Loop Experience) Required Senior Software Engineer, Reliability & Integration (Hardware in the Loop Experience Required) Lead Pyspark / SQL Engineer - Threat Detection & DataBricks San Francisco, CA $76.55-$129.16 3 months ago Senior Software Engineer, Fullstack - Quip San Francisco, CA $184,000.00-$276,100.00 1 month ago Staff Software Engineer, Spending Engineering San Francisco, CA $198,990.00-$281,900.00 11 hours ago San Francisco, CA $214,000.00-$247,500.00 9 months ago San Francisco, CA $122,400.00-$195,500.00 23 hours ago San Francisco, CA $160,000.00-$190,000.00 2 weeks ago San Francisco, CA $223,000.00-$248,000.00 2 days ago San Francisco, CA $120,000.00-$180,000.00 4 months ago San Francisco, CA $125,700.00-$334,600.00 5 days ago San Francisco, CA $130,000.00-$200,000.00 8 months ago Senior Software Engineer, Infrastructure San Francisco, CA $171,000.00-$258,000.00 2 days ago We’re unlocking community knowledge in a new way. Experts add insights directly into each article, started with the help of AI.

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