Who We Are

Ascent helps its customers follow laws and regulations. We are a new type of company, a "RegTech" organization that combines a SaaS platform with intelligent content to provide customized tools and targeted advice for our customers. We’re using modern techniques like machine learning and predictive analytics to stay on the cutting edge of our industry.

The Ascent platform makes it easy for compliance officers in regulated industries to see exactly what is expected of their companies, then track and report on the steps they’re taking to stay compliant. Before Ascent, this was a very expensive manual process. Reasonable regulation is an important part of the free market, protecting consumers and leveling the playing field. But due to their complexity and sheer volume, regulations often feel more like a punitive burden. By reducing the cost of compliance Ascent is encouraging innovation, helping existing companies stay in business, and making it possible for new companies to get started. The efficient intelligence we provide helps our customers fulfill the spirit (and letter) of their obligations in a way that lets them breathe easy and focus on building customer value through their core business.

We’re currently focused on regulations in the financial services sector, though our platform is flexible enough to eventually handle all regulated industries (EPA, FDA, etc). We recently raised $6M in Series A fundraising from respected investors in this space who truly believe in the opportunity we’re pursuing. We're a group of about 15 people, located in Chicago at Michigan/Jackson. As a team we explicitly value integrity, cooperation, persistence, customer obsession, and innovation. We believe a diversity of opinions and perspectives builds a stronger team and product.

Who You Are

As trailblazers in our space we want to work with people passionate about building new and creative products, who aren’t afraid of challenging the status quo, and who have a thirst for knowledge and crafting amazing solutions to generations-old problems.

You’ll play a meaningful role across the board in our technology, product, process, and culture. We want you to think critically about problems, potential solutions, constraints, goals - and then do whatever you can to help the team succeed. Everyone brings a unique set of skills and talents, technical and otherwise, and we want to take advantage of everything you have to offer. You’ll work directly with our CTO Chris Doyle to gain context for your work, and to get the support you need for Ascent to be a transformational period of growth in your career. We want to make sure you’re getting as much out of this opportunity as you’re putting in.

You'll be working on our internal tools (in Rails 4.2, Rails 5, PostgreSQL, neo4j, Elasticsearch, React, Sass, and Heroku). This includes a web service/APIs that protect the veracity of our proprietary data, as well as frontend features that enable our content team to create and manage that data efficiently. This data is central to our company's value proposition, so this role is a great opportunity to use your skills for an immediate impact. You'll be working closely with our content team on joint projects, so there's a bit of informal project management involved as well. You might work on projects like:

• Building out core backend and frontend features for our content team
• Using your programming ability to help our content team execute or automate critical data transformations that would be prohibitively slow as a manual process
• Establishing APIs to moderate data changes and provide data access to other parts of our ecosystem
• Writing validations and data consistency checks to ensure the completeness and correctness of our data

We’re looking for someone who has demonstrated the ability to:

• Be productive inside a rails app
• Stay organized and keep details from falling through the cracks
• Ask questions to resolve ambiguity
• Balance priorities and communicate needs and priorities
• Think critically about a problem and come up with a solution
• Collaborate in the full product cycle
• Advocate for the user (in this case often an internal user)
• Push themselves to continually grow and learn

Benefits

Ascent employees enjoy many benefits and perks, including:

• Medical, dental, vision insurance - premiums fully paid by Ascent
• Competitive salary and equity
• Walkable from all loop trains and many busses
• As much RAM as you can fit in a Macbook Pro