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 operations.
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 partner firms who now operate within Ascend and their clients.
The AI Solutions Architect owns the pipeline of AI-driven solutions that will transform Ascend’s partner firms. They will identify areas to assess ML and LLM impact, design experiments, build proof of concepts, and recommend AI architectures to the software development team. They will base their decisions on a solid understanding of the practice workflow and service delivery within Ascend. The EPD team’s success is to revitalize the accounting industry. Our goal is to provide solutions that will fundamentally change what accountants do with their time (and therefore the cost structure of the business). Success in this role will be measured by the impact of your architected solutions on employees at our partner firms and their clients.
This role offers the opportunity to work fully remote.
Key Responsibilities
Working with the Chief Product and Technology Officer, the AI Solutions Architect will be responsible for the following:
- Be a strong influencer of Ascend’s AI strategy, in partnership with the rest of the EPD leadership
- Think Big and identify opportunities for large transformations in the accounting industry
- Develop strong hypotheses for ML and LLM experiments, based on effective customer research and a deep understanding of our partner firms’ operations
- Define and prioritize the pipeline of experiments to validate prioritized hypotheses
- Identify and aggregate necessary documents, whether publicly sourced or proprietary, that can be used to drive AI-backed knowledge engines for partner firms. Ensure processes and/or infrastructure is in place to keep these documents up to date and secure
- Develop a robust data labelling process that will scale with velocity of experimentation
- Make sound choices of foundation models and other enabling technologies for these experiments based on thorough analysis of latest options
- Execute and clearly communicate outcomes, recommend necessary pivots, and reprioritize based on outcomes
- Build effective proof of concepts that can be used as effective tools for working backwards with customers
- Develop well-documented core libraries and packages that scale the velocity of our experiments
- Seamlessly transition successful experiments and proof of concepts into product development by partnering with the product management team
- Provide continuous, crisp input to the engineering team for successful productization of AI projects
- Assess in-production Ascend AI solutions for opportunities to improve, based on latest technological advances in the market and recommend the most impactful course of action.
Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology; Master’s a plus.
Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities
- Accomplished professional with unquestionable integrity, a strong work ethic, and demonstrated success implementing and improving reporting processes
- A ‘can-do’, solution-oriented individual and initiative-taking problem solver; intellectually curious, analytical, and committed to self-improvement
- Exceptional organizational and time management skills, including the ability to prioritize tasks in a demanding environment. Able to initiate, manage, and execute projects with minimal supervision
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills to maintain strong relationships with vendors and other stakeholders
- Deep understanding of Large Language Models (LLMs), their architectures, and their application in product development, specifically in automating processes (e.g., automated tax prep and review)
- Solid background in AI/ML technologies, including designing experiments, building proofs of concept, and assessing feasibility of AI-powered solutions
- Ability to design scalable AI architectures, evaluate existing solutions, and create technical roadmaps for AI-driven products
- Demonstrated experience in architecting and delivering AI/ML solutions in enterprise environments, preferably with applications in process automation
- Understanding of accounting workflows, tax preparation processes, or related fields, with experience building AI-powered tools for these industries being a strong plus.
- Ability to assess customer problems and translate them into AI-driven solutions. Experience in building business cases for AI projects is valuable
- Proven experience leading AI projects and working closely with leadership teams to influence business strategy. Ability to explain complex AI concepts to non-technical stakeholders
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.
