Senior Design Engineer

Pylon, NYC or Palo Alto (in office)

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 need

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.

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.

Senior Design Engineer

The role

Senior Design Engineer

The role

What you will do

What you need

About you

Requirements

This role isn’t for you if

About Pylon

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