Who We Are

Ascent is a Chicago-based startup that closed its Series B funding round of $19.3M in Fall 2019. Founded only four years ago, the team has since grown to almost 50 full time employees, led and supported by an executive team and board of directors with extensive experience in technology, regulatory compliance, sales and business operations. Ascent serves global financial institutions such as ING and CommBank, and is also working directly with regulators around the world in order to continually improve and advance our product.

A first mover in building proprietary RegulationAI™, Ascent delivers market leading regulatory knowledge as a groundbreaking new way for financial firms to manage compliance. It is our mission to help our customers protect their business from regulatory and reputational risk while reducing their overall cost to comply. 

We prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion and believe strongly that a team with different backgrounds and perspectives produces better results. Together, we are solving a $64 billion global problem in regulatory compliance. Watch this video to learn more about what we do.

Who You Are

We are building an intelligent compliance platform that enables compliance professionals to easily track and understand their compliance obligations and related regulations. We use a hybrid approach of machine learning and legal expertise to provide our customers with the regulatory knowledge they need. To support our platform we are also building a suite of internal data, devops, and machine learning tools; this infrastructure houses and coordinates all of our data pipelines and machine learning models.

We are looking for experienced, passionate engineers to help us build and maintain this infrastructure. 

As a Data Engineer at Ascent, you will be working closely with other Data Engineers, Data Scientists, business stakeholders, and the broader tech and product team to build applications, pipelines, and infrastructure that accelerates our regulatory data processing. Specifically, we are building a platform that a) ingests, transforms, and manages data (e.g. regulations, customer data, machine learning features, etc); b) deploys and coordinates data microservices such as machine learning models or other transformations; c) facilitates workflows across these microservices and data layers; and d) tests, monitors, and reports on itself.

Responsibilities 

• Design and build infrastructure to host applications and other internal tools (e.g. machine learning models, application deployment pipelines, etc.) as microservices using modern conventions and coding practices
• Build applications to help Ascent process regulatory data more efficiently
• Design and implement data models and database layers that support our development and data science activities
• Create automation and automated tools to enable reliable standardized development processes across the tech team
• Use creativity and independent thinking to solve technical problems
• Communicate clearly and effectively with technical and non-technical colleagues about our data engineering projects
• Work closely with developers and data scientists to understand their needs and improve their processes
• Implement strong and consistent internal API conventions and documentation
• Implement with an emphasis on tests, maintainability, and clean coding practices to produce simple solutions and reduce technical debt

Minimum Skills and Experience

• 3+ years developing and maintaining Python back-end services in production, preferably using container-based architectures
• Proven ability to develop creative technical solutions given a set of business requirements and a strong understanding of modern data architectures
• Experience with a major cloud provider, preferably AWS
• Proven ability to work productively on small teams and manage workstreams independently if needed
• Proficient in SQL, *nix CLI tools (grep/sed/awk/BASH, etc), and Python
• Experience deploying and maintaining code using git-based tools and operating in a continuous deployment/integration environment
• Experience writing thorough tests and documentation for maintainable code-bases

Bonus Points

• Experience with common devops tools (e.g. Jenkins, CircleCI, etc)
• Experience with large data sets and modern tools for managing them such as Apache Spark, Kafka, Cassandra, Mesos, etc
• Experience managing and storing large amounts of text data
• Experience with Azure
• Familiarity with Java and an understanding of the JVM ecosystem
• Experience with container management solutions like Kubernetes, Marathon, etc

Benefits

Ascent employees enjoy many benefits and perks, including:

• Competitive compensation
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance; premiums paid 95% for the individual
• Medical premiums paid 50% for covered dependents
• Life insurance
• 401K
• Commuter benefits
• Unlimited PTO
• Professional development stipend
• The opportunity to work with smart people on challenging problems!