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

Ascend Partner Services

4d•Remote

About The Position

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.

Requirements

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.

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.