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Salary: USD 90,000 - 105,000 / annual
Ascent Developer Solutions is a private lending platform serving real estate developers nationwide. This Forward Deployed Engineer role bridges software engineering and business operations, embedding with lending teams to automate complex workflows in real estate development lending.
You will work directly with business teams to learn their workflows in detail—from application through payoff—then build AI-powered production automations that scale their expertise. This is a hands-on engineering role: you'll write production code, take it through security and AI governance review, and support it post-launch. You report to the Head of Technology, and your scope grows with each project delivered.
Key responsibilities include:
- Embed with assigned business teams and document workflows step-by-step (inputs, systems, decisions, handoffs, exceptions, upstream/downstream dependencies) in a standard format reviewed and signed off by the team.
- Build and ship production automations for well-defined workflows, ensuring they integrate with the existing platform (shared data, integrations, monitoring) rather than standing alone.
- Collaborate with Platform Engineering on automation architecture and write clear specifications for work that belongs in the core lending platform.
- Write tests, documentation, and specifications; take work through code review and security/AI governance gates before production.
- Implement least-privilege agent identities, audit logging, and human review for any output affecting loan decisions or fund disbursements.
- Measure time and error rates before and after each automation and report results.
- Train users on new automations, gather feedback, and fix issues quickly after launch.
- Monitor shipped automations, respond to failures, and maintain runbooks for exception handling.
- Learn the lending business deeply enough to spot automation opportunities others miss.
- Partner with Data & Analytics on data definitions and field-discovered data-quality issues.
- Contribute reusable components to shared libraries and follow engineering standards (version control, code review, automated testing, change management).
- Protect borrower data per company security policies and AI Use Policy; raise risks early.
- Keep workflow maps, specifications, runbooks, and change logs current.
- Provide regular status updates to department leaders and the Head of Technology.
Requirements:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 1–3 years of professional experience writing code that real users relied on (software engineering, automation, data engineering, or technical analyst role with substantial coding).
- Working proficiency in Python or TypeScript and SQL; experience with REST APIs and unstructured data.
- Hands-on experience building with LLM APIs (prompting, structured outputs, document extraction) in professional or personal projects.
- Daily use of AI coding tools with the habit of verifying output with tests.
- Familiarity with loop engineering—agent workflows that act, check their own results, and stop or escalate to a person at the right point.
- Ability to ask good questions before building and explain technical ideas to non-technical colleagues.
- Systems thinking: considers how a change in one workflow affects data, systems, and people around it.
- Organized, detail-oriented writer; workflow maps and specifications are deliverables, not afterthoughts.
- Interest in financial services; exposure to lending, real estate, construction, or accounting is a plus.
- Experience with OutSystems or another low-code platform, Microsoft 365/SharePoint, or Jira is a plus.
- Portfolio, GitHub profile, or other examples of shipped work strongly preferred.
