Junior Software Engineer

About Pylon

Pylon is the mortgage-as-a-service platform, allowing businesses to create and offer mortgage credit products through our APIs and capital stack. Our mission is to unlock access to America’s largest asset class.

We're backed by prominent investors like Conversion Capital, Peter Thiel, QED, Fifth Wall, and the founders of Blend, Wealthfront, Ramp, and AngelList.

About the Role:

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 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 Engineering could be a great place for you.

About you

You:

• 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.

Requirements:

• SQL knowledge. We use an ORM and query builder, but it’s a thin wrapper over SQL. You’ve got to know SQL inside and out to really be successful.

• Intimate TypeScript familiarity. We don't need you to be comfortable with our entire stack, but knowing TypeScript already ensures you can hit the ground running.

• Can start immediately. If you're the right candidate we will move quickly, and we need you to be able to as well.

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 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.

  • We're constantly pushing on pace as we build alongside our early customers and you'll need to work very hard. That said, we aren’t into performatively working long hours. We seek to optimize quality x speed and ensure our team is doing their best work.

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 digging 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.

Our technology stack

This list is FYI. Our only hard requirements are TypeScript and SQL.

• Typescript front and backend

• React and Web Components on the frontend

• GraphQL & JSON/REST APIs

• PostgreSQL

• NestJS web framework

• Nx build system

• AWS stack using CDK for declarative infrastructure

• ECS for deployment

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

Benefits:

• Ownership: meaningful equity in Pylon

• Healthcare: comprehensive coverage for you and your dependents

• Hardware allowance: $2,000 for your workspace

• Annual Off-sites: fully paid team trips to scenic locations

• Home Financing Assistance: support in purchasing a home