AI Engineer, LLMs and Autonomous Agents

About Ascend

Ascend empowers entrepreneurial CPAs with an innovative growth model, bringing their firms into the new age. Backed by private equity from Alpine Investors, Ascend builds a modern platform for regional accounting firms, allowing them to remain independent while accessing large firm resources for growth. Ascend provides growth capital, robust talent acquisition, best-of-breed technology, catalytic leadership, shared back-office services, and modernized equity incentives. Founded in January 2023, Ascend achieved Top 100 U.S. accounting firm revenues within six months.

About Alpine Investors

Alpine Investors is a people-driven private equity firm focused on building great companies through exceptional people. Alpine fosters cultures valuing empowerment, diversity, fairness, integrity, and intellectual honesty. Founded in 2001, Alpine specializes in software and services investments with over $15 billion in AUM and offices in San Francisco, New York, and Salt Lake City.

Why this AI Engineer, LLMs and Autonomous Agents Role Exists

Ascend is combining deep industry knowledge with cutting-edge generative AI to revolutionize high-stakes, document-heavy workflows. As an AI Engineer, LLMs and Autonomous Agents, you will design and implement the autonomous agent framework to create chat-first interfaces, transforming turnaround times from days to minutes. This role frees experts to focus on judgment rather than data entry, dramatically increasing efficiency.

You will collaborate closely with an exceptional product team dedicated to quality and high product velocity. Your work will involve deep collaboration with users, product managers, and engineers to quickly bring innovative ideas to fruition, impacting users within hours or days.

What You’ll Build as an AI Engineer, LLMs and Autonomous Agents

• Agentic workflows: Prototype and deploy autonomous agents that process requests, gather context, determine next steps, and deliver completed work with minimal human interaction.
• Agent Tooling & Action Interfaces: Design a secure and auditable tool-API layer enabling agents to trigger real-world actions like emails, filings, and database updates from day one.
• Context pipelines: Develop the core of our agents: a high-speed context engine that processes diverse inputs (inbox threads, documents, notes) to provide only crucial facts to the model.
• Evaluation at scale: Establish the entire evaluation stack, including datasets, rapid benchmarks, and live telemetry, to enable fast prototyping, A/B testing with real metrics, and confident deployment or rollback decisions.
• Data-Privacy Guardrails: Integrate red-team tests, Personally Identifiable Information (PII) scrubbing, and role-based access controls directly into the inference path, ensuring built-in safety.
• Developer Canvas / Playground: Ship an internal platform where PMs and engineers can compose, test, and share agent chains rapidly without requiring local setup.

Your Success in 12 Months Will Be Measured By

• Agent adoption: Your autonomous workflows and tool interfaces successfully process thousands of real requests weekly, showing low hand-off rates and receiving excellent feedback from specialists.
• Prototype-to-prod velocity: The time from idea to production decreases to single-digit hours, driven by your evaluation stack, dev canvas, and automated rollbacks.
• Context engine reach: The knowledge graph securely indexes millions of artifacts (emails, notes, docs) with sub-second retrieval, powering every agent's decision.
• Privacy and trust: Red-team drills and external audits yield zero critical findings, thanks to the robust guardrails you embedded in the inference path.
• Team efficiency lift: Internal teams automate repetitive tasks (test writing, migration scripts, doc drafts) using the playground you developed, saving 10+ developer-hours per person each month.

You’ll Thrive Here If You Possess

• Ability to translate product and UX language, converting vague user issues into tangible agent capabilities.
• A preference for automation over manual work and a proactive approach to spreading AI tools that enhance team speed.
• Experience shipping production-grade LLM-powered agents, including knowledge of secure tool invocation, rate limits, and hallucination defense.
• Proficiency in creating clean evaluation pipelines, datasets, metrics, dashboards, and treating them as first-class code.
• Expertise in crafting context pipelines and vector search solutions that efficiently transform messy inputs into model-ready facts.
• A safety-first mindset, incorporating red-team strategies, PII scrubbing, role-based access, and audit logs.
• Passion for building internal platforms (CLI, UI, or both) that enable quick prototyping of agent chains without local setup.
• A continuous awareness of generative AI research, constantly bringing fresh ideas to the team.

Qualifications for this AI Engineer, LLMs and Autonomous Agents Role

• 5+ years of experience building production-grade frontend applications.
• Driven by speed, innovation, and delivering products 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.
• Bonus: Exposure to AI/LLM interfaces or agentic UIs a major plus.

What You Can Count On at Ascend

Ascend lives by its values:

• Own it: Seize growth opportunities with entrepreneurial passion, speed, and accountability.
• Serve whole-heartedly: Love and serve people with positivity and kindness.
• Be excellent: Set a high bar because the mission matters.
• Win together: Stay in sync, achieve as a team, and celebrate each other.
• Bring the sunshine: Have fun and bring enthusiasm to make the journey joyful.

Key skills/competency

• Large Language Models (LLMs)
• Autonomous Agents
• Generative AI
• Frontend Development
• React.js
• TypeScript
• Context Pipelines
• Evaluation Frameworks
• Data Privacy & Security
• Prompt Engineering