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

Ascend Partner Services

5d

About The Position

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
Why this role exists
Ascend is pairing deep industry know-how with cutting-edge generative AI to reinvent high-stakes, document-heavy workflows. You’ll design and ship the autonomous agent framework that makes those workflows vanish behind a chat-first interface — reducing turnaround from days to minutes and freeing experts to focus on judgement, not data entry.
In this role, you’ll work with an incredible product team dedicated to incredible quality and blazing high product velocity. You’ll work in deep collaboration with our users, our product folks, and our engineers to bring your great ideas to our users’ fingertips in just a matter of hours or days.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience building production-grade frontend applications
• Driven by speed, innovation, and delivering products that users genuinely love.
• Demonstrated experience rapidly designing, building, and iterating product prototypes.
• Strong passion for deeply understanding and solving customer problems.
• Proven ability to independently design and deliver products that make an immediate impact.
• Daily hands-on experience with AI-driven coding tools (Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code, Codex).
• Expertise in HTML, CSS (incl. pre-processors), TypeScript, and modern frontend frameworks (React preferred)
• Deep understanding of responsive design, accessibility (WCAG), and frontend performance optimization
• Familiarity with design systems (e.g., Storybook, Radix, shadcn/ui) and component-based architectures
• Experience with modern build systems and tooling (Vite, Webpack, Next.js, Remix, Indexdb, TanStack)
• Knowledge of testing tools (Jest, Testing Library, Playwright) and QA practices for frontend applications
• Appreciation for elegant code and the craft of UI engineering, clean, maintainable, expressive

Nice To Haves

• Exposure to AI/LLM interfaces or agentic UIs a major plus

Responsibilities

• Agentic workflows: Prototype and deploy autonomous agents that take a request, gather context, decide next steps and deliver finished work with minimal human touch.
• Agent Tooling & Action Interfaces: Design the tool-API layer that lets agents trigger real-world actions (emails, filings, database updates) safely and auditable from day one
• Context pipelines: Build the backbone of our agents: a lightning-fast context engine that digests messy inbox threads, docs, and notes, and serves only the gold-standard facts to the model.”
• Evaluation at scale: Own the whole eval stack, datasets, lightning-fast benches, and live telemetry, so we can prototype in hours, A/B with real metrics, and ship to prod (or roll back) with total confidence.
• Data-Privacy Guardrails: Embed red-team tests, PI-scrubbing, and role-based access gates directly into the inference path, so safety is baked in, not bolted on.
• Developer Canvas / Playground: Ship an internal playground where PMs and engineers can compose, test, and share agent chains in minutes, no local setup required.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed