Pylon
Staff Software Engineer, AI — Pylon
Base pay range: $200,000.00/yr - $250,000.00/yr.
At Pylon, we are a small team building an ambitious product in the mortgage space. We’re looking for an engineer who can see the opportunity of what we’re building towards and wants to have a hand in building it. We’re searching for someone who finds difficult problems invigorating and fits well into a high‑performing team built on mutual respect and reliance.
You’ll be a founding member of our AI team, working directly with the CTO to automate mortgage underwriting. Your job is to take complex, open‑ended problems and figure out how to solve them—sometimes that means LLMs, sometimes it’s a rules engine, sometimes it’s a vendor API, and sometimes it’s just good code.
Mortgage underwriting involves hundreds of discrete verification, compliance, and validation steps. You’ll tackle these sub‑problems one by one—each is greenfield and requires different technical approaches. You’ll define the approach, architect the solution, write a significant portion of the code, and ship it to production. As the team grows, you’ll determine how to split the work and set technical direction.
This isn’t a pure ML role—we’re not training models from scratch. It’s also not about integrating off‑the‑shelf APIs. It’s about having strong technical judgment to pick the right tool for each problem and then building production systems that work in a regulated environment.
You’ll be hands‑on from day one. Week one includes taking an underwriter certification course to deeply understand the domain you’re automating. You’ll work in our existing mortgage engine codebase, building new automation services that integrate with the platform.
What we’re looking for
Strong systems engineering foundation:
You’ve built large‑scale production systems at high‑caliber technology companies. You write code that others can maintain and build on. You understand distributed systems, APIs, data consistency, and operational excellence. You’ve made consequential architectural decisions and lived with the results.
Recent AI/ML product experience:
In the past 1‑2 years, you’ve worked on a product that uses LLMs or ML in production. You understand when AI is the right tool and when it’s not. You’ve dealt with prompt engineering, model evaluation, or integrating third‑party AI services. You don’t need to have trained models yourself, but you have shipped AI‑powered features to users.
Technical judgment across problem spaces:
You can look at a problem and decide whether it needs an LLM, optimization algorithm, rules engine, or solid code. You’re comfortable evaluating build‑versus‑buy decisions and vetting third‑party tools. You’ve worked on problems where the right solution wasn’t obvious from the start.
Comfort with regulated domains:
Ideally you’ve worked in fintech, healthtech, or another regulated space. You understand that moving fast doesn’t mean breaking things. You can absorb complex domain knowledge and apply it to technical decisions.
Hands‑on execution:
You’ll build systems yourself, not just design them—you’ll write ~50% of the time. You can take an ambiguous goal and turn it into a working system. As the founding member, there’s no one else to delegate to initially.
Basics
Job title: Staff Engineer, AI
Location: Palo Alto, CA
Stock options: part of equity package
Health insurance, 401(k), dental, etc.
Technology stack Languages: TypeScript (primary), with flexibility for the right tool per problem. Data: PostgreSQL. Infrastructure: AWS.
About you
Have strong opinions that you’re willing to defend.
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.
Are self‑motivated. You can take a goal and drive toward it without needing extensive hand‑holding.
Are comfortable with ambiguity. You 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 absorb it, get on top of it, and build something better.
Don’t underestimate the domain. You'll take an underwriter course to understand what you're automating. You recognize that mortgage is genuinely complex and need to understand it deeply.
About the team
We’re building a platform that is only possible due to deep technology investments and first‑principles thinking. Cargo‑culting what’s come before won’t be sufficient.
We build from the ground up for the first time — like a research project where you have to ship to intelligent, opinionated customers regularly.
We’re a small team; generalists are needed. If you’re smart, flexible, and like getting into everything, we want you.
Working in a regulated space
Mortgage is regulated at the federal and state level.
We move fast, but breaking things isn’t an option.
About Pylon Pylon rewires 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 others.
Compensation range: $200K - $250K.
#J-18808-Ljbffr
At Pylon, we are a small team building an ambitious product in the mortgage space. We’re looking for an engineer who can see the opportunity of what we’re building towards and wants to have a hand in building it. We’re searching for someone who finds difficult problems invigorating and fits well into a high‑performing team built on mutual respect and reliance.
You’ll be a founding member of our AI team, working directly with the CTO to automate mortgage underwriting. Your job is to take complex, open‑ended problems and figure out how to solve them—sometimes that means LLMs, sometimes it’s a rules engine, sometimes it’s a vendor API, and sometimes it’s just good code.
Mortgage underwriting involves hundreds of discrete verification, compliance, and validation steps. You’ll tackle these sub‑problems one by one—each is greenfield and requires different technical approaches. You’ll define the approach, architect the solution, write a significant portion of the code, and ship it to production. As the team grows, you’ll determine how to split the work and set technical direction.
This isn’t a pure ML role—we’re not training models from scratch. It’s also not about integrating off‑the‑shelf APIs. It’s about having strong technical judgment to pick the right tool for each problem and then building production systems that work in a regulated environment.
You’ll be hands‑on from day one. Week one includes taking an underwriter certification course to deeply understand the domain you’re automating. You’ll work in our existing mortgage engine codebase, building new automation services that integrate with the platform.
What we’re looking for
Strong systems engineering foundation:
You’ve built large‑scale production systems at high‑caliber technology companies. You write code that others can maintain and build on. You understand distributed systems, APIs, data consistency, and operational excellence. You’ve made consequential architectural decisions and lived with the results.
Recent AI/ML product experience:
In the past 1‑2 years, you’ve worked on a product that uses LLMs or ML in production. You understand when AI is the right tool and when it’s not. You’ve dealt with prompt engineering, model evaluation, or integrating third‑party AI services. You don’t need to have trained models yourself, but you have shipped AI‑powered features to users.
Technical judgment across problem spaces:
You can look at a problem and decide whether it needs an LLM, optimization algorithm, rules engine, or solid code. You’re comfortable evaluating build‑versus‑buy decisions and vetting third‑party tools. You’ve worked on problems where the right solution wasn’t obvious from the start.
Comfort with regulated domains:
Ideally you’ve worked in fintech, healthtech, or another regulated space. You understand that moving fast doesn’t mean breaking things. You can absorb complex domain knowledge and apply it to technical decisions.
Hands‑on execution:
You’ll build systems yourself, not just design them—you’ll write ~50% of the time. You can take an ambiguous goal and turn it into a working system. As the founding member, there’s no one else to delegate to initially.
Basics
Job title: Staff Engineer, AI
Location: Palo Alto, CA
Stock options: part of equity package
Health insurance, 401(k), dental, etc.
Technology stack Languages: TypeScript (primary), with flexibility for the right tool per problem. Data: PostgreSQL. Infrastructure: AWS.
About you
Have strong opinions that you’re willing to defend.
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.
Are self‑motivated. You can take a goal and drive toward it without needing extensive hand‑holding.
Are comfortable with ambiguity. You 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 absorb it, get on top of it, and build something better.
Don’t underestimate the domain. You'll take an underwriter course to understand what you're automating. You recognize that mortgage is genuinely complex and need to understand it deeply.
About the team
We’re building a platform that is only possible due to deep technology investments and first‑principles thinking. Cargo‑culting what’s come before won’t be sufficient.
We build from the ground up for the first time — like a research project where you have to ship to intelligent, opinionated customers regularly.
We’re a small team; generalists are needed. If you’re smart, flexible, and like getting into everything, we want you.
Working in a regulated space
Mortgage is regulated at the federal and state level.
We move fast, but breaking things isn’t an option.
About Pylon Pylon rewires 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 others.
Compensation range: $200K - $250K.
#J-18808-Ljbffr