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

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 

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.  

What you’ll build 

• 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. 

In 12 months, we’ll measure your success by: 

• Agent adoption: Your autonomous workflows and tool interfaces are processing thousands of real requests every week, with low hand-off rates and rave reviews from specialists. 

• Prototype-to-prod velocity: Idea-to-production time has dropped to single-digit hours, powered by your eval stack, dev canvas and automated rollbacks. 

• Context engine reach: The knowledge graph indexes millions of secure artifacts (emails, notes, docs) with sub-second retrieval, fueling every agent decision. 

• Privacy and trust: Red-team drills and external audits pass with zero critical findings thanks to the guardrails you embedded in the inference path. 

• Team efficiency lift: Internal squads now automate repetitive tasks (test writing, migration scripts, doc drafts) with the playground you shipped, saving 10+ dev-hours per person each month. 

You’ll thrive here if you: 

• Speak the language of product & UX, translating fuzzy user pain into concrete agent capabilities. 

• Default to automation over manual toil and actively spread AI tooling that makes the whole team faster. 

• Have shipped production-grade LLM-powered agents and know the nitty-gritty of secure tool invocation, rate limits and hallucination defence. 

• Can spin up clean evaluation pipelines, datasets, metrics, dashboards, and treat them as first-class code. 

• Enjoy crafting context pipelines and vector search that turn messy inbox threads into model-ready facts in milliseconds. 

• Think safety first: red-team mind-set, PII scrubbing, role-based access, and audit logs baked in. 

• Love building internal platforms (CLI, UI, or both) that let PMs and devs prototype chains without local setup. 

• Keep a finger on the pulse of gen-AI research and share fresh ideas with our team non-stop. 

Qualifications:

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

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.