Who We Are

At Ascent we are building an intelligent compliance platform that enables compliance professionals to easily track and understand their compliance obligations and related regulation.

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.

Who You Are

As an Infrastructure Engineer at Ascent, you will be working closely with Developers, Data Scientists and the broader tech and product team to build infrastructure that a) ingests 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. We use both hosted solutions and open source tools. We have a strong bias towards containerization and internal transparency. We also place a high premium on our culture and values, both within the tech team and the company as a whole. We believe a diversity of opinions and perspectives creates a stronger team and product, and we are committed to an equal opportunity hiring process.

Responsibilities

• Design and build infrastructure to host machine learning models as microservices using modern conventions and coding practices
• Help design and implement data models and database layers that support our data science activities
• Use creativity and independent thinking to solve technical problems
• Mentor more junior team members
• Communicate clearly and effectively with technical and non-technical colleagues about our data engineering projects
• Work closely with data scientists to understand their needs and processes
• Work closely with our whole technology team to successfully maintain our data platform alongside the broader technology stack
• 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

• 2+ years developing and maintaining 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

Preferred Skills and Experience

• 1+ years building and maintaining data science pipelines that incorporate machine learning models in a production environment behind an API
• 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.
• Familiarity with Java and an understanding of the JVM ecosystem.
• Experience with container management solutions like Kubernetes, Marathon, etc.
• Experience with solutions for “fast data” architectures like DC/OS or other similar architectures and tools
• Experience managing and storing large amounts of text data and text transformations

Benefits

Ascent employees enjoy many benefits and perks, including:

• Competitive compensation
• Medical, dental, vision, mental health insurance – with premiums fully paid by Ascent
• 401K offered
• Unlimited PTO and Bank Holidays
• Flexible work schedule
• As much RAM as you can fit in a Macbook Pro
• Professional development stipend
• Top floor office in Prudential Plaza with an amazing view of the park/lake and Pedway access
• The opportunity to work with smart people on challenging problems!