Lead Product Manager, API Platform

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

Pylon turns mortgage origination into a single API, so the API is the product. Every loan our customers originate, every integration they build, and every agent that talks to Pylon goes through it.

We’re hiring a Lead PM to own the Pylon API. That includes the domain model, the API design, and the experience of every developer who builds on it. Our API is built on GraphQL, and the schema is where all of mortgage’s complexity has to turn into something a developer can understand in an afternoon.

You’ll be deciding how mortgage gets represented in software, for our customers and for the industry. If you get it right, building a mortgage product on Pylon should feel as easy as building payments on Stripe.

What you’ll do

• Set the API strategy across Pylon so every product and engineering team is building toward one consistent platform, and help grow the team as it scales
• Own the roadmap and quality bar for the API. Developers are your main customers
• Own the domain model. You’ll define the core entities, relationships, and lifecycle states of a mortgage, and keep the model clean as we add products, channels, and regulations
• Lead GraphQL schema design, from types, queries, mutations, and subscriptions to pagination, errors, and naming, and set the standards other teams follow
• Run API design review so new fields and mutations stay consistent and hold up over time
• Decide how we version, deprecate, and evolve the schema so we can move quickly without breaking customers
• Own the developer experience, including docs, the API explorer, SDKs, sandboxes, webhooks, and onboarding. The number that matters most is how fast a new customer gets their first loan through
• Work with engineering on performance, reliability, auth and permissions, rate limiting, and observability
• Write and ship code yourself. You’ll commit schema and API changes alongside engineers, and build against the API so you know exactly how it feels to use
• Build compliance into the API itself, so required data, disclosures, audit trails, and permissions live in the model instead of being left to whoever integrates
• Work closely with the Agent Platform team so the API is as easy for agents to use as it is for people
• Work with GTM and Account Management to scope integrations, support deals, and make sure customers succeed
• Use AI in your day-to-day work

About you

• You have strong opinions and you’ll defend them, including about naming, which matters more than most people think. 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 customer wants a new field. You know when to say yes, when to say no, and when what they really need is a better abstraction.
• You’re comfortable in a heavily regulated market. Compliance is non-negotiable for us. We work with regulators to push the industry forward and get better outcomes for borrowers. We play by the rules, and we play to win.
• You care a lot about the developers building on Pylon and the borrowers they serve, and you hold a high bar for them. We’ll do whatever it takes to make our customers successful.
• 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. We can’t automate everything right away, so when we need a temporary workaround, you flag it, write it down, and push for the real fix.
• You’re good with people. You’ll work with internal engineering teams, engineers at our customers, and partners and vendors, 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 well enough to model it more cleanly than people who’ve spent their careers in it.

Requirements

• 7+ years in software, including at least 4 as a PM on API or developer platform products. An engineering background is a plus
• You’ve owned and scaled public APIs that developers actually like using, at real scale
• You’re excellent at domain modeling and have taken messy, complicated real-world domains and turned them into clean entities, relationships, and state machines
• You know GraphQL deeply, including schema design, nullability, connection-based pagination, error modeling, federation, and how to evolve and deprecate a schema
• You know API design beyond GraphQL too, like REST, webhooks and events, idempotency, OAuth and scoped API keys, and rate limiting
• You write code and are comfortable committing to a production codebase, prototyping against the API, and going deep on architecture with engineers
• You’ve built developer experience, like docs, SDKs, sandboxes, and developer portals
• You’ve built 0-1 enterprise software in a regulated industry
• You can write SQL and define metrics for API adoption and developer experience
• Nice to have: mortgage or fintech infrastructure experience, or familiarity with industry standards like MISMO

We don’t expect you to be a mortgage expert on day 1. Over time, though, you’ll need to become one of the most trusted mortgage experts on the team to do this job well.

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