Great to Meet You! We are Ascenda
Ascenda powers the growth of leading financial services brands worldwide with premium rewards programs that differentiate their products, drive profitable customer behaviors, and create sustained engagement.
We are behind the world-class rewards propositions of major banks and fintechs around the globe, including brands like American Express, Capital One, Brex, Robinhood, Ramp, HSBC, Virgin Money (Australia), SMBC (Japan), ICBC (China), Bradesco (Brazil), ANZ (Australia), HDFC (India) and many others.
We are a thriving global Loyalty as a Service company and experiencing rapid expansion. Join our dynamic finance team as one of its earliest leaders, contributing to the development of our financial planning strategies as we strive for hypergrowth. Our team spans 20 cities worldwide, with dual headquarters in Singapore and New York, totaling 250 team members.
Join us as Senior Software Engineer in Singapore/Vietnam!
The Role
About TransferConnect: The Technical Gravity
TransferConnect is the
high-availability, high-integrity platform responsible for seamless, real-time conversion of loyalty points to airline miles and hotel rewards worldwide. We are the central exchange, partnering with most premium global travel and financial services programs.
This Platform Isn't Just a Service, It's a Core Financial And Technical Pillar Of Our Business, Processing Millions Of Transactions Annually. As a Significant Revenue Driver, TransferConnect Demands Engineering Excellence. We Operate At The Intersection Of Financial Technology And Global Travel, Requiring Meticulous Focus On
- Transactional Integrity: Ensuring the absolute correctness of every point transfer.
- Massive Scale: Handling peak loads from the world's largest banks and fintechs.
- Operational Reliability: Maintaining 99.99%+ uptime across a distributed, cross-partner ecosystem.
Our mission is to maximize member reward utility while solving non-trivial challenges in cross-partner data consistency, real-time transfer latency, and auditability at scale.
Your Impact
As a Senior Software Engineer, your primary objective is to take ownership of the architecture and implementation needed to dramatically increase the scale, reliability, and transactional integrity of our TransferConnect APIs.
You will strategically evolve our core transfer platform to handle unprecedented transaction volumes globally, enabling new business verticals to launch on our service. This requires a sharp focus on distributed systems design, latency optimization, and operational excellence to ensure the platform maintains an ultra-high bar for uptime and correctness throughout every point transfer customer journey.
System Architecture & Scaling
- Drive the design and implementation of a highly scalable, fault-tolerant service to handle large volumes of loyalty transactions (points accrual). Actively contribute to the scaling efforts of mission-critical systems
Reliability Engineering & Operational Excellence
- Focus on building best practices in system reliability, including robust error handling, monitoring, alerting, and implementing resilience patterns (eg, circuit breakers, bulkheads where appropriate)
- Participate in on-call rotation and contribute to improving operational playbooks
Technical Leadership & Mentorship
- Lead technical discussions, set coding standards, conduct high-quality, architecture-level code reviews, and actively mentor mid-level and junior engineers on improving quality, system design, maintainability, and scaling techniques
Cross-Functional Collaboration
- Collaborate with product, commercial, and engineering teams to ensure the technical vision aligns with business goals for customer experience
Domain Ownership
- Take full ownership of the key services within the points transfer journey, ensure system integrity, and a smooth, secure experience throughout the process.
Who You Are
Core Engineering:
- Solid Backend Experience: Proven experience designing, building, and operating highly available backend systems at scale. 3-5 years of experience with deep proficiency in modern backend language (eg, Ruby or a strong willingness to master it quickly, along with Java/Go/Python experience being a plus.)
- Reliability and Performance Focus: Extensive knowledge of database scaling techniques (sharding, replication, consistency models), message queues (Kafka, Sidekiq, etc.), and caching strategies (Redis, Memcached) to ensure system reliability and performance under load.
Service Ops Requirements
- Cloud & Containerization: Practical experience working with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and container technologies like Docker. Exposure to, or a strong desire to master, Kubernetes workflows (deployments, services, ingress/egress patterns).
- Networking Fundamentals: Sound understanding of core internet protocols (TCP/IP, HTTP/2), including how SSL/TLS works and best practices for securing API endpoints.
- Observability & CI/CD: Experience implementing robust monitoring, logging, and tracing solutions (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack). Familiarity with modern CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitLab CI, Jenkins) and a commitment to automating operational tasks.
Collaboration & Growth
- Collaboration & Communication: Excellent ability to articulate technical concepts and trade-offs clearly to both engineers and non-engineers.
Growth Mindset
- An eager desire to take on greater responsibility, grow into a technical leader, and actively mentor junior peers as you progress.
Why Join Ascenda
Ascenda offers the unique opportunity to lead in the loyalty ecosystem space, shaping the future of rewards programs. We are passionate, we keep things simple, we focus on results, we work together & we innovate!
We Have a Rewarding Working Place That Provides a
- High growth environment & exponential career development
- Mobile & flexible work environment
- WFH office equipment allowance
- Medical insurance coverage
- Employee recognition programs
- Competitive compensation
- Travel perks & Employee rewards
Ascenda is dedicated to diversity and inclusion, welcoming candidates from all backgrounds. Join us on our mission to make loyalty simple and rewarding for everyone, everywhere.
Ready to power growth for the financial services industry Apply now! Together, we'll redefine what's possible.
