Senior Staff Backend Engineer

Senior Staff Backend Engineer 

Ascent is a leading provider of innovative financial products and student support services that enable more students to access education and achieve academic and economic success. Everything Ascent offers is designed with the best-in-class teams and technology to increase every student's ability to plan, pay, and succeed in their education and career. Ascent's planning tools and financing resources are co-created by students for those in college, graduate school, and career training programs. Ascent offers financial wellness education, student success services, and one-on-one and digital career coaching that put students' academic and professional goals within reach. Ascent has been widely recognized for its strong culture – named “Best Places to Work” by the San Diego Business Journal for the past 5 years – and as an industry leader – named “Best Student Loan” by NerdWallet for the past 3 years. 

Description 

As a Senior Staff Backend Software Engineer, you will take a leadership role in driving the technical direction and implementation of our backend services. Working alongside a talented team of Product Managers, Designers, and Engineers, you will shape the APIs that power our member-facing products, influence the architecture of our systems, and ensure the long-term health and scalability of our codebase. This position emphasizes both technical expertise and the ability to mentor and guide team members in building high-quality, scalable solutions. You will be empowered to propose innovative ideas, solve complex problems, and champion best practices across the organization. 

Responsibilities 

• Lead the design and implementation of large-scale, low-latency services, elegant abstractions, shareable libraries, and robust APIs. 

• Drive technical decision-making and architectural discussions to ensure scalability, reliability, and security of our systems. 

• Oversee the execution of large-scale projects, collaborating closely with cross-functional teams and mentoring other engineers. 

• Write high-quality, maintainable code and ensure comprehensive test coverage. 

• Extend and enhance our services and APIs to improve configurability, reliability, and performance. 

• Proactively identify and mitigate risks, ensuring the resilience of our systems. 

• Establish and promote high technical standards, including compliance and security best practices, across the engineering team. 

• Foster a culture of collaboration, innovation, and continuous improvement within the team. 

Qualifications 

• 12+ years of experience crafting and implementing highly scalable and performant RESTful APIs 

• Expert level knowledge and experience programming in Golang 

• Proficiency in any other modern object-oriented programming language 

• Proven ability to lead technical teams, mentor engineers, and influence cross-functional collaboration. 

• Fluency in any database technologies (e.g. RDBMS like Mysql, MSSQL, or Postgres) 

• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with a passion for mentorship and team development. 

• Broad knowledge and understanding of SaaS, PaaS, IaaS industry with hands-on experience of public cloud offerings (AWS, GAE, Azure) 

• Familiarity with cloud architecture patterns and an engineering discipline to produce software with quality 

• Familiarity designing, implementing, and maintaining cloud infrastructure on AWS using Terraform to manage Infrastructure as Code (IaC) 

Education 

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, a related field or equivalent work experience.  

Competitive pay with bonus, and comprehensive benefits package that includes, but not limited to: 

• Compensation includes a base salary of $155,000 - $185,000 commensurate with experience, plus bonus and options. 

• Company Stock Options 

• 401(k) + Company Match 

• Medical, dental, and vision coverage 

• Annual company HSA contribution of $1,650 

• Life insurance, disability, and critical illness 

• 14 Paid Holidays! Eleven (11) + Two (2) Community Days + Your Birthday! 

• Snacks and drinks in the office 

• Tuition reimbursement program 

• Generous paid leave policies 

• $2,000 Vacation Incentive Plan after 3 years + $1,000 Sabbatical Day 

• Wellness, Work from Home funds, and more!