Senior Design Engineer

Job Description

Job Description

About Pylon

America’s $13T mortgage market is one of the most important financial systems in the world. It underwrites the middle class and is the mechanism through which millions of families build wealth. But while every other financial instrument has been simplified to an API call, mortgages are still assembled by hand.

We started from zero and created the first vertically integrated mortgage platform that turns origination into a single API.

Publicly traded companies and the country’s largest originators are already building on Pylon. Revenue is compounding monthly. We’re backed by Peter Thiel, Conversion Capital, QED, Citi, Fifth Wall, and the founders of Ramp, Blend, and Mercury.

Working at Pylon isn’t for those seeking comfort. The people who thrive here have high agency, strong opinions, and a track record of delivering outcomes without direction. Many of us are former founders. We move quickly, challenge each other directly, and take full ownership of results. It’s hard work, but it will be worth it.

Join us in building America’s mortgage rails .

About the role

We’re hiring a Design Engineer, which for us means a designer who builds.

To be clear, this isn’t a frontend engineering job where you wait for someone to hand you mockups. You’re the designer. You decide how things should look, feel, and behave, and then you build them yourself in production code, down to the pixel. Use Figma when it helps, but code is where the design actually happens.

Mortgage is one of the most complicated products most people will ever use, and most mortgage software looks like it. You’ll change that. You’ll design and build the borrower application, borrower dashboards, loan officer tools, and the components customers embed in their own products. You’ll also build the design system that makes everything at Pylon feel fast, clear, and trustworthy.

What you’ll do

• Design and build product experiences yourself, from early exploration to polished production interfaces, with no handoff in the middle

• Own Pylon’s design system, including tokens, type, color, spacing, and a component library that makes it easy for any engineer to build something that looks great

• Build components customers can theme and embed in their own products without losing quality, accessibility, or consistency

• Take complicated workflows and dense mortgage data and make them easy to understand, using layout, hierarchy, interaction, and motion

• Prototype in real code with real data, put it in front of borrowers, loan officers, and customers, and iterate quickly on what you learn

• Get the details right, including states, edge cases, responsiveness, loading and empty states, keyboard interactions, and accessibility

• Work closely with PMs and engineers, raise the design bar across the team, and help others improve their work through feedback and reusable patterns

• Use AI and agentic coding tools throughout your process, from exploring ideas to shipping production interactions

About you

• You have strong opinions and you’ll defend them, especially about craft. We argue about decisions a lot here, and we’ll ask you to explain your thinking and stand behind it. We also expect you to change your mind when someone shows you you’re wrong.

• You’re ruthless about priorities. Every screen could be better. You focus on the details that matter most to users, and you’re comfortable saying no to good ideas that come at the wrong time.

• You’re comfortable in a heavily regulated market. Disclosures, consent, and accessibility are part of the experience, and you design them to be clear instead of hiding them. We play by the rules, and we play to win.

• You care a lot about borrowers, loan officers, and the lenders who serve them, and you hold a high bar for them. You notice the small things other people miss.

• You default to software over manual work. One of our guiding principles is that anything in the backend mortgage process done by a human is a bug. Good design should take work off people’s plates whenever it can, and when an experience depends on a manual workaround, you call it out and push for the real fix.

• You’re good with people. You’ll work with product, engineering, customers, and leadership, and you know how to build real relationships and get results through them.

• You have a lot of ideas. You notice things that could be better about the product and the team, and we’ll give you room to act on them.

• You’re willing to get into the weeds. You can learn mortgage quickly, to the point where you sound like you’ve been in the industry for 20 years.

This role isn’t for you if

• You’d rather build other people’s designs than make design decisions yourself

• You design in Figma and hand it off for someone else to build

• You’re mostly interested in backend or infrastructure work

Requirements

• 3+ years as a product designer who codes, a design engineer, or a frontend engineer who makes the design calls

• A portfolio of live products or working prototypes with excellent visual and interaction work. This matters more to us than your title or years of experience

• Great taste and strong fundamentals in typography, layout, hierarchy, color, interaction, and motion

• Fluency in React, TypeScript, semantic HTML, and modern CSS, and the ability to ship production-quality frontend code

• Experience building or leading a design system or component library, including tokens and theming

• Comfort in Figma, mostly as a place to explore ideas

• A strong grasp of accessibility and responsive design

• Experience using AI and agentic coding tools in your design work

• Nice to have: experience designing data-heavy or workflow-heavy products, especially in fintech, lending, or another regulated industry

We don’t expect you to be a mortgage expert on day 1. Over time, though, you’ll need to understand mortgage well enough to design for it with confidence.

Must live in or be willing to relocate to Palo Alto (CA) or New York City.