Frontend Product Engineer - Canada

About Ascend

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 

Position Summary

Ascend is building an Engineering, Product, and Design (EPD) team that will power the technology transformation that the industry needs. Machine learning (ML) and Large Language Models (LLMs) will be one of the main pillars of this technological transformation. The primary customers for the EPD team at Ascend will be the staff of Ascend’s partner firms and their clients.

We are looking for an exceptional Front-End Product Engineer who loves solving real customer problems at an incredible speed. You’ll report directly to the Director of Product Engineering and you’ll collaborate deeply with our product team and our customers.

Your primary goal will be to quickly identify customer pain points and deliver prototypes - often within a single day - that solve these issues in intuitive and innovative ways. You’ll own the entire product design process (no Figma hand-offs here!), creating solutions that genuinely improve user

workflows. After validation, you'll partner with our engineers to seamlessly connect these prototypes to backend systems, ensuring they're production-ready.

The person in this role will live at the intersection of user empathy, frontend engineering, and rapid prototyping. You’ll work closely with product and engineering peers to translate complex workflows into delightful experiences—and have the opportunity to invent interaction patterns for a category-defining platform.

This role is perfect for you if you sweat the details: you see design as a language, not just a layer, and you treat code as an extension of that vocabulary. You’re inspired by motion, obsessed with responsiveness, and energized by building UX that feels alive. You want to work in a team where performance, craft, and iteration speed all matter equally. You're excited by fast iteration, love leveraging AI tools to amplify your coding speed, and want your career to bend toward product innovation while staying hands-on with the technology.

This is a rare opportunity to join a fast-moving, zero-tech-debt team from day one and design high-quality interfaces that feel intuitive, joyful, and deeply useful.

Key Responsibilities:

• Deeply understand customer needs through direct conversations and collaboration with product managers and customers.
• Rapidly prototype intuitive, impactful products that solve real customer problems using React, shadcn, and TypeScript.
• Own the full design process - from understanding problems to creating exceptional solutions.
• Iterate quickly, using direct customer feedback to continuously refine and enhance prototypes.
• Champion high-quality user interfaces with delightful interactions that our users love to use
• Design and implement reusable, elegant component libraries let us continuously increase our product velocity
• Build UX patterns that make AI-backed features feel seamless and intuitive
• Optimize frontend performance and accessibility across devices and browsers
• Work closely with full-stack engineers to ensure exceptional UX performance
• Introduce and advocate for best practices in frontend engineering, including testing and state management
• Constantly improve and champion AI-driven development tools (Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code, Codex) to accelerate development and enhance code quality.
• Help shape the platforms, frameworks, tools, and systems we’ll use to create a world-class frontend engineering team at Ascend

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.