---
title: 'Senior Data Platform Engineer at LawZero'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-data-platform-engineer-lawzero-montreal-x9384bvj4059'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-10'
---

# Senior Data Platform Engineer at LawZero

- **Company:** LawZero
- **Location:** Montréal, Canada
- **Posted:** 2026-09-09
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/lawzero/jobs/4401056009

## Job description

We are seeking a visionary and highly technical Senior Data Platform Engineer to architect, implement, scale, and maintain the data engine powering our next-generation frontier models.

In this high-impact role, you will bridge the gap between cutting-edge AI research and high-performance engineering, treating the data platform as an internal product with our researchers as your primary customers. You will be responsible for building automated, petabyte-scale data processing pipelines and for guaranteeing that everything they produce is efficient, reliable, and fully traceable. Our technical environment is not fixed and will evolve as our projects scale. We expect someone capable of evolving it, not only following industry trends, challenging it, and making sustainable decisions in close collaboration with our Research and Product teams.

## Key Responsibilities

- Scale and automate the data processing stack to handle petabytes of data and ensure its smooth operation.
- Design the execution layer for pipeline stages of differing computational shape, matching each stage to an appropriate engine and keeping the pipeline saturated end to end.
- Ensure efficient use of compute resources, including GPU access for compute-intensive data processing tasks.
- Make pipelines reliable at scale, with graceful failure recovery, restartability, and observability that attributes bottlenecks and cost to the responsible stage.
- Ensure all datasets, including the intermediate outputs of each transformation stage, are versioned, reproducible, and fully traceable to meet specific and dynamic experiment needs, and are accompanied by datasheets, in accordance with internal Data Governance policies.
- Partner with the Research team to ensure the datasets you produce integrate seamlessly with the training pipelines.

## Skills and Qualifications

- A bachelor's degree in a relevant field (e.g., computer science, computer engineering, software engineering) is required.
- 5+ years of experience designing, implementing, and managing large-scale distributed data processing systems, or working within large-scale distributed ML data frameworks, with recent experience using e.g. Ray, Apache Spark, workflow orchestrators, Apache Arrow, and/or Parquet.
- Demonstrated ownership of a data processing system under real throughput, reliability, and cost pressure. The specific frameworks matter less to us than evidence that you have had to reason about where a large pipeline breaks and why.
- Experience profiling and optimizing throughput and cost across heterogeneous workloads, including GPU-accelerated stages.
- Experience with dataset versioning, lineage, and reproducibility tooling.
- Ability to collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams, document best practices, and stay updated with the latest advancements in large-scale data processing and software development.
- Experience with workload managers (e.g., Ray, Kubernetes, Slurm).
- Familiarity with containerization tools (e.g., Docker, Enroot).
- Familiarity with data infrastructures and platforms (e.g., vector databases).

## What we offer

- The chance to contribute meaningfully to a globally critical initiative.
- Comprehensive health benefits (including mental health and wellness management account).
- 20 days of vacation per year upon start.
- Employer contribution of 4% to your retirement savings, with no required employee match.
- Additional compensation totalling 8% of your salary to apply towards additional retirement savings or bonuses (independent of group and individual performance).
- A team of passionate world-class experts in their field.
- A collaborative and inclusive work environment in our vibrant office space in the heart of Little Italy, in the trendy Mile-Ex district, close to public transportation.

## About LawZero

LawZero is a non-profit organization committed to advancing research and creating technical solutions that enable safe-by-design AI systems. Its scientific direction is based on new research and methods proposed by Professor Yoshua Bengio, the most cited AI researcher in the world. Based in Montreal, LawZero’s research aims to build non-agentic AI that learns primarily to understand the world rather than to act in it, giving truthful answers to questions based on transparent and externalized probabilistic reasoning. Such AI systems could be used to accelerate scientific discovery, to provide oversight for agentic AI systems, and to advance the understanding of AI risks and how to avoid them. LawZero believes that AI should be cultivated as a global public good—developed and used safely towards human flourishing. For more information, visit [www.lawzero.org](https://www.lawzero.org/)

You belong here

At LawZero, diversity is important to us. We value a work environment that is fair, open and respectful of differences. We welcome applications from highly qualified individuals interested in working towards our mission in a respectful, inclusive and collaborative setting.

Your personal information will be collected and processed by LawZero to evaluate your application for employment in compliance with our [Privacy Policy](https://lawzero.org/en/website-privacy-notice). Under privacy laws in force in your country of residence, you may have several privacy rights, such as to request access to your personal information or to request that your personal information be rectified or erased. Details on how you can exercise your rights can be found in our Privacy Policy.

## About LawZero

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: LawZero is a Canadian nonprofit research organization developing "Scientist AI," a non-agentic, safe-by-design artificial intelligence system.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Nonprofit research organization; funded through philanthropic grants)
- **Headquarters**: Montréal, Quebec, Canada
- **Founded**: June 3, 2025
- **Founders**: Yoshua Bengio

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: AI Safety Research
- **Target customers**: The organization is not a commercial entity; its research outputs are intended for the global public good, with potential downstream users including governments, AI companies, and scientific researchers.
- **Mission or purpose**: To develop AI systems that are "safe by design" through technical research insulated from commercial and government pressures, cultivated as a global public good.

## Products & Services
- **Scientist AI**: A novel, non-agentic AI system designed to understand the world through probabilistic reasoning, produce transparent and auditable predictions, and have no hidden goals or preferences. The system is built on three mechanisms: contextualization (separating facts from opinions), consequence invariance (preventing feedback from downstream outcomes), and a generator–estimator architecture (a creative generator held accountable by a neutral estimator). Intended uses include accelerating scientific discovery, providing guardrails for agentic AI systems, and advancing understanding of AI risks. **Type**: Research / Technical Framework

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not applicable (nonprofit)
- **Key Metric**: Total Philanthropic Funding: > US$35 million (as of August 2025, including a grant from the Gates Foundation). An additional > CAD$100 million in financial backing from the Government of Canada was under discussion as of February 2026.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Funders include Jaan Tallinn, Schmidt Sciences, Coefficient Giving, the Future of Life Institute, and the Gates Foundation. Operating partner is Mila – Quebec AI Institute. Affiliated with MATS (AI-alignment training program).
- **Growth Signals**: Launched in June 2025 with ~15 researchers; grew to ~30 employees by February 2026, with stated plans to expand to more than 100 within a year. Secured significant government interest (letter of intent from the Government of Canada). Inaugural board and global advisory council announced in January 2026, including high-profile members such as historian Yuval Noah Harari and former Prime Minister of Sweden Stefan Löfven.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Founder Reputation**: Founded by Yoshua Bengio, the world’s most cited living AI researcher and a Turing Prize winner, lending unparalleled scientific credibility.
- **Mission-Driven Position**: Operates as a nonprofit, explicitly insulated from market and government pressures, which differentiates its research from major for-profit AI labs (e.g., OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic).
- **Unique Technical Approach**: Its core concept, "Scientist AI," is a fundamentally different path to advanced AI—non-agentic and designed for safety from the ground up—rather than a modification of existing agentic systems.
- **Compute Advantage**: A potential partnership with the Government of Canada is structured to provide substantial compute resources (the majority of expenditure is for compute), a critical and expensive resource for frontier AI research.

## Strategic Focus
- **Research & Development**: The entire organization is focused on advancing the "Scientist AI" framework, with primary activities being theoretical research (as seen in arXiv preprints and white papers), algorithm development, and building the technical architecture.
- **Talent Acquisition**: Aggressively hiring to scale the research team from ~30 to over 100 people within the next year.
- **Global Governance**: Building a global advisory council and board to influence AI safety policy and standards, in addition to technical research.
- **Scientific Application**: One concrete application area being explored is the use of Scientist AI to accelerate drug discovery and scientific research, supported by the Gates Foundation grant.

## Why Work Here
- **Highly Mission-Driven**: A rare opportunity to work on fundamental AI safety research at a nonprofit, free from the commercial pressures of major AI labs. The explicit goal is to build AI as a global public good.
- **World-Class Leadership**: Work directly under and alongside Yoshua Bengio and a leadership team with deep expertise in AI.
- **Growth Trajectory**: The organization is in a rapid scaling phase (growing from 15 to 100+ people), offering early employees significant influence and rapid career growth.
- **Prime Location**: Based in Montréal, a major AI research hub with access to talent from Mila and top universities.
- **Policy Impact**: Involvement with a high-profile global advisory council that includes former heads of state, offering a chance to shape AI governance.
- **Work Environment**: The culture emphasizes safety, mission integrity, and rigorous scientific research. The organization is structured as a research lab, not a commercial entity.

## Sources
1. [LawZero Official Website](https://lawzero.org/en)
2. [LawZero Careers Page (Greenhouse)](http://job-boards.greenhouse.io/lawzero)
3. [Wikipedia - LawZero](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LawZero)
4. [LawZero Team Page](https://lawzero.org/en/team)
5. [LawZero Research Page](https://lawzero.org/en/research)

## Other roles at LawZero

- [Platform Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/platform-engineer-lawzero-montreal-4bef2adt2wpn) — Montréal, Canada
- [Senior Manager, Talent Acquisition](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-manager-talent-acquisition-lawzero-montreal-j5eqjx54dfe3) — Montréal, Canada
- [Operations Admin Lead – Executive Office](https://feeny.ai/job/operations-admin-lead-executive-office-lawzero-montreal-fvvna9c8aper) — Montréal, Canada
- [Senior ML Data Processing Developer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-ml-data-processing-developer-lawzero-montreal-5wp0w4r3spk7) — Montréal, Canada
- [Senior Researcher Communications Specialist](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-researcher-communications-specialist-lawzero-montreal-70swcv9djdbd) — Montréal, Canada
- [Machine Learning Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/machine-learning-manager-lawzero-montreal-ddxs7d0jnk2v) — Montréal, Canada
- [Join our Talent Community (future opportunities)](https://feeny.ai/job/join-our-talent-community-future-opportunities-lawzero-multiple-a0gzf9abwev7) — Multiple
- [Responsible AI & Data Governance Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/responsible-ai-data-governance-lead-lawzero-montreal-fj7e83h98pqa) — Montréal, Canada
- [Mathematical Scientist for AI Safety Research](https://feeny.ai/job/mathematical-scientist-for-ai-safety-research-lawzero-montreal-kv2e1etp7wk0) — Montréal, Canada
- [Director, Evaluations](https://feeny.ai/job/director-evaluations-lawzero-montreal-nhj2b35b8jy2) — Montréal, Canada