Backend Engineer, LLMs and Autonomous Agents (R&D) - Canada

Title: Backend Engineer, LLMs and Autonomous Agents (R&D) - Canada Location: Canada - Remote

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 operations.

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 $17 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

Public accounting is at a crossroads. CPAs are retiring faster than new ones are entering the profession, and the traditional partnership governance model has struggled to make the technology investments the industry needs. Ascend is building the technology transformation that the profession knows it needs but cannot manifest on its own, fundamentally changing how accountants spend their time, restoring the role of the trusted advisor, and revitalizing a profession at an existential moment.

Ascend is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to join the AI team, led by the Chief AI Officer, to deliver on this mission. Beginning with tax, the largest and most manual-intensive area of our business, this individual will own and execute on the engineering plan to significantly reduce project effort at Partner Firms through AI-enabled products. The Senior Backend Engineer will work in tight collaboration with Product Management, Frontend Engineering, and Partner Firm accountants to ship high-velocity, high-impact solutions that lay the foundation for similar transformations in CAAS and Audit.

The Senior Backend Engineer will report to the Director, Product Engineering.

Key Responsibilities

Own and Deliver the Tax Product for Designated Firms

• Get up to speed on the existing codebase and current product requirements, building the foundational knowledge needed to contribute effectively from day one.
• Partner closely with Product Management to design and build solutions, ensuring tight collaboration with Partner Firms to align on real-world needs and workflows.
• Work hand-in-hand with the Frontend Engineer to deliver complete product slices in fast, predictable iterations that compound into meaningful effort reduction at the firm level.
• Use AI-native development tools (Claude, Cursor, and similar) as the primary engineering environment to accelerate productivity and maintain consistency across the team.
• Contribute to the continued development of Ascend’s Agentic Framework, strengthening the platform’s ability to support intelligent, scalable features across future product lines.

Drive AI Vision & Architectural Excellence

• Deeply understand Ascend’s AI vision and actively drive its implementation within the backend domain, ensuring engineering decisions ladder up to long-term product strategy.
• Advocate for AI-enabled architecture and infrastructure decisions, ensuring backend systems are designed to support intelligent, scalable, and reliable features.
• Internalize and improve Ascend’s software builder tenets across performance, security, scalability, and reliability, suggesting thoughtful improvements when opportunities to strengthen engineering practices emerge.
• Contribute production-level code across backend services and infrastructure, following secure coding standards and respecting data access permissions and protection policies.

Accelerate Product Velocity

• Deliver high-quality code on time and steadily increase delivery capacity, demonstrating clear ownership over outcomes rather than just outputs.
• Unblock teammates by reviewing code, improving documentation, and surfacing process or tooling issues that slow the team down.
• Drive sustained improvements in product velocity across the broader Ascend engineering organization, balancing the speed of close firm collaboration with the discipline needed to stay focused on effort-reduction goals.

Live the Ascend Values and Carry the Culture

• Serve wholeheartedly: operate in the “inverted hierarchy” where CPAs are the customer, serving them with love, deep care, and a sincere desire to see them flourish as professionals.
• Own it: move with the passion, speed, and accountability of an entrepreneur.
• Be excellent: set a high bar because the mission matters, everything Ascend ships must be excellent to be the best in the industry.
• Win together: collaborate across functions and firms with a spirit of collegiality, and help merchandise the technology vision on the M&A trail.
• Bring the sunshine: bring positivity, optimism, and enthusiasm into the work and the team.

Skills & Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field; equivalent professional experience considered.
• Significant experience as a backend or full-stack engineer building and shipping production software, ideally in a high-velocity startup, AI, or enterprise SaaS environment.
• Strong proficiency in modern backend languages and frameworks (e.g., Python, TypeScript/Node.js, Go), with a track record of designing scalable APIs and services.
• Hands-on experience integrating with foundation model APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, or similar) and building agentic or LLM-powered features in production.
• Demonstrated fluency with AI-native development environments (Claude, Cursor, Copilot, or similar) and a clear point of view on how these tools accelerate engineering output.
• Strong ROI judgment and the ability to balance close customer collaboration with disciplined prioritization, building toward the long-term vision without getting pulled into low-leverage digressions.
• Working knowledge of cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure), CI/CD pipelines, containerization, and secure coding practices.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to build trust quickly with Product Managers, fellow engineers, and non-technical Partner Firm leaders.
• Bias toward delivery, intellectual curiosity, and a genuine excitement about transforming a traditional industry with AI.

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.