Front End Product Engineer

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, visitwww.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.