About Ascend
Backed by private equity from people-focused Alpine Investors, Ascend is building a dynamic platform for regional accounting firms that enables them to stay independent while accessing the resources of a Top 25 firm to help them grow. Ascend provides access to growth capital, robust talent acquisition and training, leading quality management resources, best-of-breed technology, AI tools, an offshore captive, shared back-office services, a catalytic leadership system, and modernized equity incentives so that firms can surmount today’s industry challenges to reach their full potential.
For more information, visit www.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 team to deliver AI driven transformation across our accounting platform. Our first major focus is tax workflows, which represent the majority of our revenue and involve significant manual effort performed by highly skilled professionals.
The thesis is simple and ambitious. By redesigning tax workflows with modern AI and Large Language Models, we can meaningfully reduce project effort, improve quality, and change how accountants spend their time. The opportunity is to reshape the cost structure of the business and make accounting a more attractive long term profession.
We are looking for a Front End Product Engineer who can build quickly in close collaboration with accountants while maintaining a strong architectural foundation. You will design and implement user interfaces that power AI backed workflows, reduce effort in measurable ways, and integrate cleanly with our backend systems.
This role requires hands on ownership, strong product judgment, and comfort operating in ambiguity. You will move from problem discovery to production code in tight feedback loops with real users. You will help define how accountants interact with AI in their daily work.
Key Responsibilities
Work directly with accountants at partner firms to understand tax workflow pain points and validate solutions
Rapidly design and ship production quality frontend experiences that reduce manual effort
Build and integrate critical user flows for our Tax products in close collaboration with product managers and backend engineers
Translate complex, document heavy workflows into clear, intuitive interfaces
Design reusable frontend components that promote consistency, speed, and scalability
Refactor and improve frontend architecture to support long term product expansion
Ensure high standards for performance, accessibility, maintainability, and reliability
Implement logging, metrics, and instrumentation to surface issues before they impact users
Leverage AI coding tools and emerging autonomous development agents to accelerate output
Contribute to prompt design and user interface patterns that improve the performance and usability of LLM powered features
Participate in product planning discussions to prioritize features that drive measurable effort reduction
Support deployment and rollout efforts by responding quickly to feedback and production issues
Qualifications
5 or more years of experience building production grade frontend applications
Strong expertise in TypeScript and modern frontend frameworks, with React preferred
Demonstrated experience shipping user facing features in fast moving environments
Proven ability to move from user discovery to implemented solution with minimal hand holding
Experience building reusable component systems and improving frontend architecture over time
Deep understanding of responsive design, accessibility standards, and frontend performance optimization
Experience integrating frontend applications with backend APIs and complex data flows
Comfort working closely with non technical users and incorporating direct feedback
Experience using AI driven development tools to increase productivity
Strong product intuition and bias toward delivering measurable business impact
Bonus:
Experience building AI or Large Language Model powered user interfaces
Familiarity with prompt engineering or LLM observability concepts
Exposure to workflow automation or document heavy enterprise applications
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.
