Founding Data Scientist

About the role

What We Do

Insurance is a $10T industry still running on PDFs, email threads, and manual reconciliation. Ascend is changing that. We built the first and only complete financial operations platform purpose-built for insurance — combining accounting automation, payments, and premium financing in a single vertically integrated solution. In five years, we've become the market leader: over 4,000 businesses, including more than half of the 50 largest brokers in the country, trust Ascend to bring clarity to complex accounting operations from collection to close.

How We Do It

Ascend automates the financial operations that insurers, MGAs, and agencies run every day and embeds directly into the transactions where money actually moves. Point solutions are easy to build and even easier to copy. The companies that win won't just sell tools — they'll capture value where the money actually moves. Ascend is built for exactly that moment. Our customers don't just adopt software, they unlock measurable efficiency with a proven 5-7x return on investment.

Our team is onsite in San Francisco. We bring deep expertise in insurance, fintech, and financial infrastructure to build what the industry has never had.

Why We Do It

The insurance industry intermediates trillions of dollars — and almost none of that infrastructure was built for the modern era. Legacy systems aren't just inefficient; they're a ceiling on what the industry can become.

Ascend's mission is to become the leading financial automation platform for insurance by 2030 — powering the financial operations of the entire industry and transforming the way trillions of dollars move. We're not building another point solution, we're building the financial backbone of insurance.

Your Role

We're hiring a Senior Data Scientist to own measurement across the surfaces that move our customers' money. Reporting to the Head of Data, you will settle the metric definitions that three teams currently disagree on, set the thresholds that decide when a human touches a document, and stay accountable for those thresholds after they go live. We cut a standalone data scientist role to fund this one. Building a model got cheap; being answerable when a threshold is wrong did not.

Responsibilities will include

Objective #1: In your first 30 days, you will:

- Get deep into Ascend's products, data infrastructure, and the metric definitions the three teams currently disagree on

- Build relationships with Product, Engineering, and the Head of Data to understand how measurement decisions get made today

- Audit the scores and thresholds already in production and map where instrumentation is missing

Objective #2: In your first 60 days, you will:

- Propose and settle the accuracy, success, and exception metrics for Ascend's products

- Start owning the thresholds that decide when the system acts on its own versus routing to a person