--- title: 'Brand Designer at Ascend' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/brand-designer-ascend-san-francisco-ry87vvtm50dz' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-10-13' --- # Brand Designer at Ascend - **Company:** Ascend - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Posted:** 2026-10-07 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-13 - **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/ascend21/jobs/5447178008 ## Job description ## 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. ## The Role You’ll own Ascend’s brand: its expression, evolution, and architecture as we grow. You’ll report to the head of design and partner closely with product and marketing. We don’t treat brand and product as separate disciplines — the product is where the brand is proven, and the brand is how the product is understood. We want someone who treats brand as infrastructure as much as expression, with the instincts of an art director. - Give the brand fuller expression. Much of our brand lives in reputation. Evolve and codify it across every medium and touchpoint. - Own the brand’s architecture. Products, our AI agent, Altitude 2027, acquired brands: decide what’s shared, what’s distinct, and how the family grows. - Own the moments where customers meet us. Launches, email, onboarding, proposals, case studies — the surfaces that decide whether someone trusts us with their money. - Experiment with code and AI. Build tools and generative systems that produce form no template could, and put that range in everyone’s hands. - Make the brand a living system. Spot patterns, make them self-serve, and keep it responsive as the company changes. - Propose where the brand goes next. Bring a defensible point of view, and push the work further than the brief asked. ## Responsibilities Will Include Objective #1: In your first 30 days: - Learn Ascend's products, our customers, and how money moves through insurance - Audit every place the brand shows up today, from product and web to email, decks, events, and print, and map where it's strong, thin, or inconsistent - Get fluent in our design system and how brand and product share it - Ship real work early by taking over recurring brand and marketing requests - Present an initial point of view: what the brand gets right, what's missing, and where you'd invest first Objective #2: In your first 60 days: - Take over Altitude 2027's visual system and carry it through to print: signage, wayfinding, program, merch, stage and screen - Propose a direction for the brand's next chapter through references, texture, imagery, and type, and align design, marketing, and leadership around it - Define the brand architecture: how our products, our AI agent, events, and acquired brands relate to Ascend - Build the first templates and toolkits that let teams produce on-brand work without routing through you Objective #3: In your first 90 days and beyond: - Deliver Altitude 2027 in May, end to end - Codify the evolved brand into a living system of guidelines and components that people actually use, across every medium - Use code and AI to build visual tools and generative systems that expand what the brand can look like - Own the visual layer of onboarding, lifecycle email, and product launches, alongside product design - Track where the brand holds and where it drifts, and keep refining it as the company grows Must Have - 3+ years in brand or visual design, ideally in-house. We care more about the work than the number. - A portfolio that shows you built or meaningfully evolved a brand system, not only executed against someone else's. - Art direction ability: you can build a vision from references, imagery, texture, and type, and show the thinking behind it, not just the finished pieces. - Range across mediums: digital, print, environmental, and enough motion to bring things to life. - Systems instincts: you know when to build a template, a pattern, or a tool instead of another one-off asset. - Ownership: you run initiatives end to end, propose before you're asked, and can defend a decision or change your mind when the argument is better. - Clear communication, written and spoken. You can explain why something works and why it doesn't. ## Nice to Have - Experience with B2B, fintech, or technical products - Motion design or animation - Comfort working near code or a headless CMS - AI fluency: using AI to explore, experiment, and build internal tools Base Salary Range: $100,000-$150,000 ## Benefits - Unlimited PTO 🌴 - Meaningful equity 🤑 - Dog friendly office 🐕 - Commuter benefits 🚌 - Free lunch in office everyday 🥡 - Health care for you and your dependents 🍎 ## Equal Opportunity We are committed to equal opportunity employment and embrace diversity within our organization. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. We encourage candidates to apply even if their experience doesn't precisely match this opportunity. We value diversity and are dedicated to equal opportunity employment. ## About Ascend ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Ascend provides a complete financial operations platform purpose-built for the insurance industry, combining AI-powered accounting automation, payments, and premium financing in a single vertically integrated solution. - **Entity Type**: Private (Series A) with $285.5M total funding - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States - **Founded**: 2021 - **Founders**: Andrew Wynn (Co-Founder & Co-CEO) and Praveen Chekuri (Co-Founder & Co-CEO) ## Core Business - **Primary industries**: Insurance financial technology (Insurtech) and accounting automation - **Target customers**: B2B – insurance agencies, wholesalers, MGAs, and carriers (serves over 4,000 insurance businesses including 25 of the 50 largest brokers) - **Mission or purpose statement**: “Build the systems insurance runs on” – rebuilding the financial and accounting infrastructure that the insurance industry runs on. ## Products & Services - **Billing & Invoicing**: Automate invoice creation, delivery, and collections to accelerate payment cycles. - **Cash Application**: Turn bank deposits into clean, matched accounting entries inside the ledger, eliminating suspense items. - **Premium Financing & Payments**: Finance and collect premiums in a single, seamless workflow to keep policies in force. - **Carrier Payables**: Reconcile and disburse carrier payables without manual spreadsheets. - **Direct Bill Automation**: Fetch, reconcile, and post commission statements to close books faster. - **Automation & AI**: AI models that learn and parse financial documents to improve accuracy of billing and reconciliation over time, with human-in-the-loop control. All products form a unified “collection to close” platform that connects to existing Agency Management Systems (AMS) and Policy Administration Systems (PAS) without a rip-and-replace migration. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed - **Key Metrics**: - Annual Revenue (estimated): $1.2M (LinkedIn estimate) - Total Funding: $285.5M (Seed $5.5M in Sept 2021, Series A $30M in Jan 2022, and Debt Financing of $250M in Jan 2022) - **Notable Investors/Partners**: The Series A round had 19 investors; the seed round involved 17 investors. Specific investor names are not listed in provided sources, but the company has attracted backing from multiple venture and debt investors. - **Growth Signals**: - Headcount: 68 employees (+55.4% YoY) - LinkedIn followers: 10,288 (+21.3% yearly) - Active job postings: 6 (as of mid-2026) - Trusted by over half of the 50 largest insurance brokers in the U.S. - Expanded presence to Hong Kong, Poland, and Philippines. ## Competitive Advantages - **Purpose-built for insurance**: Unlike generic accounting software, Ascend is designed specifically for insurance workflows (billing, carrier payables, premium financing). - **End-to-end automation**: Covers the full financial operations stack from billing to reconciliation to payables in one platform. - **Seamless integration**: Connects to existing AMS and PAS systems, avoiding the cost and disruption of core system replacement. - **AI that improves over time**: Machine learning models parse carrier statements and financial documents, increasing accuracy continuously while keeping humans in control. - **Single pane of glass**: All accounts receivable and payable resolve into a shared accounting layer for consistent balances and explainable reports. ## Strategic Focus - **Rebuilding insurance financial infrastructure**: The company positions itself as the infrastructure layer for insurance finance, addressing fragmented manual processes that cause silent failures. - **Scaling across the insurance ecosystem**: Targeting agencies, wholesalers, MGAs, and carriers with a unified platform. - **Investing in AI and automation**: Continuing to refine AI models to handle edge cases and complex carrier statements. - **Growing headcount deliberately**: Hiring across go-to-market, engineering, product, and customer success to support rapid customer adoption. ## Why Work Here - **Culture and values**: Emphasis on “deep work, clear communication, and long-term growth — not performative hustle.” Values include “Own it,” “Choose velocity,” “Inspire with humility,” “Know your customer,” and “Stability.” - **Work environment**: San Francisco-based office; roles are listed as San Francisco location. Remote/hybrid policy not explicitly stated but likely office-centric for collaborative roles. - **Benefits and perks**: - Competitive salary and equity with 401k employer match - 100% medical, dental, and vision coverage for employee and dependents - 14 weeks parental leave for primary caregivers, 8 weeks for secondary caregivers - **Engineering culture**: Building systems that handle complex financial transactions at scale; team includes engineers from companies like Instacart, Looker, and Epic Games. The tech stack and specific engineering practices are not detailed but the work involves AI, data pipelines, and high-volume financial data processing. - **Growth trajectory**: 55% YoY headcount growth and active hiring signal upward momentum, offering career advancement opportunities. ## Sources 1. [useascend.com](https://useascend.com/) 2. [useascend.com/careers](https://useascend.com/careers) 3. [LinkedIn (useascend)](https://www.linkedin.com/company/useascend) 4. [Greenhouse careers page](http://job-boards.greenhouse.io/ascend21) 5. 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