Benevity is hiring a Senior Staff Data Platform Engineer in Calgary!
Benevity, a Canadian B Corporation whose software helps companies run giving, volunteering and grantmaking programs, is hiring a Senior Staff Data Platform Engineer in Calgary. Reporting to the Director of Engineering, this person serves as the technical anchor for the company's data platform and owns the design of its data democratization strategy, pairing architectural vision with hands-on delivery. The role centres on enabling domain engineering teams to move data from source systems through a medallion lakehouse to reporting without depending on a central team for bespoke code, and on making governance, lineage and quality automatic rather than manual. It is a hybrid position: there is no fixed in-office quota, though occasional in-person time is valued for onboarding, projects and team connection.
Key responsibilities
- Set hands-on technical direction across the entire data path, from streaming and batch ingestion through transformation, lakehouse, catalog and semantic layers
- Design and build self-service platform capabilities so domain teams can land new sources and schema changes, promote data through medallion layers, and define the data products reporting consumes
- Lead design and delivery of the medallion architecture on an AWS lakehouse using S3, Apache Iceberg, Glue and Lake Formation with dbt transformations, while evolving existing warehouse environments and planning a migration path
- Make pipelines configuration- and metadata-driven so new attributes, tables or data products are declarative changes rather than custom code
- Ensure every pipeline, dataset and data product is registered in DataHub with schema, lineage and ownership propagated automatically
- Define versioned, tested data product and semantic layer contracts with explicit ownership, quality expectations and deprecation paths
- Build AI-assisted internal developer tooling that scaffolds pipeline configuration, models, contracts and tests from specifications, with governance enforced in CI
- Partner with principal architects on reusable architecture patterns, and with product managers and staff developers to translate requirements into technical designs
- Apply cloud-native security practices, maintain architecture decision records, mentor developers and contribute to architectural reviews
Key requirements
- Degree in computer science, computer engineering or equivalent experience
- 8+ years of scalable development experience including lead and software design responsibilities, with substantial time spent building data platforms and pipelines
- 2+ years in a technical leadership role on platform builds, transformation or modernization initiatives
- Strong software design fundamentals, including domain-driven design, loosely coupled systems and event-driven services
- Track record of building reusable abstractions and frameworks, with judgement about when not to over-engineer
- Deep hands-on data engineering across streaming and batch: Debezium, Kafka and Flink, including schema evolution and delivery guarantees
- Lakehouse and medallion architecture experience with S3, Iceberg, Glue and Lake Formation, plus dbt transformation practice
- Large-scale warehouse engines and declarative, asset-based orchestration such as Airflow
- Metadata, catalog and lineage platforms such as DataHub, and metadata-as-code approaches
- Data contracts and schema governance enforced automatically in CI and at runtime, plus data quality, observability and SLAs
- Semantic layer modelling as a governed product, ideally LookML with exposure to dbt Semantic Layer or Cube
- AWS cloud-native depth; working familiarity with GCP (BigQuery, Looker); Azure a plus
- Seniority: Senior Staff
- Work mode: Hybrid
- Key skills: Apache Iceberg, AWS Glue, AWS Lake Formation, Amazon S3, dbt, Kafka, Flink, Debezium, Airflow, DataHub, Data Contracts, Semantic Layer, LookML, BigQuery, AWS
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