Senior Software Engineer, Frontend

Overview

Ascent is a leading provider of innovative financial products and student support services that enable more students to access education and achieve academic and economic success. Everything Ascent offers is designed with the best-in-class teams and technology to increase every student's ability to plan, pay, and succeed in their education and career. Ascent's planning tools and financing resources are co-created by students for those in college, graduate school, and career training programs.

Ascent offers financial wellness education, student success services, and one-on-one and digital career coaching that put students' academic and professional goals within reach. Ascent has been widely recognized for its strong culture – named “Best Places to Work” by the San Diego Business Journal for the past 5 years – and as an industry leader – named “Best Student Loan” by Nerd Wallet for the past 3 years.

The Senior Software Engineer (“Engineer”) will play a key role in the architecture, development, and delivery of our customer-facing and internal applications, while helping shape the next generation of digital products s role is ideal for a senior-level engineer with deep experience building modern web applications with React and production mobile applications with React Native, supported by strong JavaScript and Type Script expertise, and who can drive high-quality implementation across usability, performance, scalability, and maintainability.

• Architect, build, and enhance modern web applications and scalable, accessible user interfaces using React, JavaScript, Type Script, HTML, and CSS.
• Design reusable components and frontend patterns that improve consistency, maintainability, and development speed.
• Contribute to the development and feature delivery of mobile applications using React Native.
• Collaborate with product, design, and backend teams to refine requirements and deliver exceptional user experiences.
• Improve application performance, quality, and resiliency through profiling, debugging, testing, and continuous optimization.
• Build and improve CI/CD pipelines to support reliable software delivery.
• Participate in code reviews, technical design discussions, release planning, and prod support.
• Make pragmatic technical decisions that balance user experience, maintainability, delivery timelines, and long‑term platform health.
• Mentor other engineers and help raise engineering standards, code quality, and development best practices across the team.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• 7+ years of software engineering experience delivering production applications across the full development life cycle.
• Strong hands‑on experience building modern frontend applications with React, JavaScript, and Type Script, with deep knowledge of frontend architecture, component-based design, state management, responsive design, and browser behavior.
• Experience developing mobile applications with React Native, or strong React experience with interest and ability to contribute to React Native applications.
• Experience integrating applications with RESTful APIs and third‑party platforms.
• Experience with front‑end and mobile testing, CI/CD pipelines, release processes, secure coding, and application reliability in production environments.
• Familiarity with front‑end build tools, package management, module bundling, and modern workflows.
• Proficiency with Git‑based source control and collaborative development workflows in agile teams with strong ownership and cross‑functional partnership.
• Strong debugging, problem‑solving, and software design fundamentals, with the ability to reason through complex application behavior.
• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS and modern deployment environments is a plus.
• Prior experience in financial services, lending, or other regulated environments is a plus.

• Strong product mindset with a passion for building intuitive, high‑quality user experiences.
• High ownership, accountability, and follow‑through, with a…