Staff Engineer

About Ascend 

Ascend empowers entrepreneurial CPAs to reach their goals with an innovative growth model that brings their firms into the new age. Backed by private equity from people-focused Alpine Investors, Ascend is building a modern platform for regional accounting firms that enables them to stay independent while accessing the resources of a large CPA firm to help them grow. Ascend provides access to growth capital, robust talent acquisition, best-of-breed technology, a catalytic leadership system, shared back-office services, and modernized equity incentives so that firms can surmount today’s industry challenges and reach their full potential. Founded in January 2023, the company attained revenues sufficient to qualify it as a Top 100 U.S. accounting firm within six months of operation. For more information, visit ascendtogether.com. 

About Alpine Investors 

Alpine Investors is a people-driven private equity firm that is committed to building great companies by working with, learning from, and developing exceptional people. Alpine prides itself on fostering cultures where people value empowerment, diversity, fairness, integrity, and intellectual honesty. Founded in 2001, Alpine specializes in investments in companies in the software and services industries. Alpine has over $15 billion in AUM and has offices in San Francisco, New York, and Salt Lake City. 

For more information on the firm, visit www.alpineinvestors.com  

Position Summary 

Ascend is building an Engineering, Product, and Design (EPD) team that will power the technology transformation that the industry needs. Machine learning (ML) and Large Language Models (LLMs) will be one of the main pillars of this technological transformation. The primary customers for the EPD team at Ascend will be the staff of Ascend’s partner firms and their clients. 

Reporting to the Director of Product Engineering, the Staff Engineer will play a critical role in shaping and delivering world-class AI-powered products for our highly engaged customers in Canada. You’ll work on high-impact solutions leveraging the latest LLM technologies, partnering closely with a high-performing product and design team. 

Ascend’s goal is to revitalize the accounting industry—and your work will be at the heart of that transformation. As a senior technical leader, you’ll help drive the architecture, development, and continuous improvement of software products that fundamentally change how accountants spend their time (and in turn, reshape the cost structure of the industry). 

Success in this role will be measured by your ability to drive engineering excellence, contribute to a high-velocity development environment, and help your team continuously ship impactful, AI-powered solutions to our partner firms. 

This role is perfect for you if you have fully embraced the innovation and uncertainty in software that has arrived through LLMs. You are excited about the latest tools that allow you to build software fast. At the same time, you are confident in your ability to use guardrails and build secure scalable software that customers love using. This is your opportunity to build a modern, AI-powered engineering team that ships modern, AI-first software, all from scratch with no tech debt, for existing, enthusiastic users. 

Key Responsibilities 
Working with the Director of Product Engineering, the Staff Engineer will be responsible for the following: 

• Delivering on Ascend’s AI strategy  

• Thinking Big about software velocity in the new world of LLMs. Designing the systems and software that will make our group one of the highest velocity teams in the world, leveraging modern IDE's, agentic tools, automated code generation and review tools, and other new opportunities as they arise. 

• Being the chief software architect and empowering your team to move fast while addressing security and scalability 

• Contribute directly to delivering on Ascend’s AI strategy by building intelligent, user-focused products powered by LLMs 

• Helping develop the foundation for ML and LLM experiments that will allow for real time evals, observability, and human-in-the-loop patterns.    

• Designing the systems that will empower our product development lifecycle to achieve rapid iteration and continuous improvement while maintaining high uptime and superb system stability. 

• Establishing high quality repeatable mechanisms for coding, reviews, security, testing, and scalability 

• Communicating crisply to Ascend executive leadership and shaping their product vision on software products 

Qualifications: 

• 10+ years of experience in software development, with at least 5+ years in a technical leadership or management role 

• Proven experience leading high-performing software engineering teams, ideally in AI/ML-driven environments 

• Strong experience in hiring, mentoring, and scaling development teams, fostering a culture of innovation and execution 

• Deep understanding of Large Language Models (LLMs), Machine Learning (ML), and AI-driven applications 

• Experience with modern software development tools, including AI-powered development environments, automated code generation, and agentic tools 

• Strong proficiency in architecting and designing scalable, secure, and high-availability software solutions 

• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure, and modern DevOps practices 

• Proficiency in modern programming languages such as Python, TypeScript, Golang, Rust, or similar 

• Strong knowledge of microservices architecture, API development, and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes, etc.) 

• Experience in building AI-powered products from scratch and launching them successfully to market 

• Strong understanding of software velocity and iterative development, particularly in fast-paced startup or growth environments 

• Track record of delivering AI-first software solutions with a focus on usability, security, and scalability 

• Excellent ability to communicate technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders, including executive leadership 

• Strong strategic thinking and problem-solving abilities, with a focus on driving business outcomes through technology 

• Passion for working in an agile, collaborative environment with cross-functional teams, including Product Management and Design 

What You Can Count On (We live by our values): 

• Own it: We seize growth opportunities with the passion, speed and accountability of an entrepreneur. 

• Serve whole-heartedly: We love our people and serve them with positivity and kindness. 

• Be excellent: We set a high bar because our mission matters. 

• Win together: We stay in sync, achieve as a team and celebrate each other. 

• Bring the sunshine: We have fun and bring enthusiasm to make the journey joyful. 

At Ascend, we provide a fair and equal employment opportunity for all candidates regardless of race, color, religion, national origin, gender, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, age, marital status, disability, or any other legally protected characteristic. Ascend hires and promotes individuals solely based on qualifications for the position to be filled and business needs.