---
title: 'Senior Staff Developer, AI and Machine Learning at Benevity'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-staff-developer-ai-and-machine-learning-benevity-toronto-4empmzqf4fx3'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-16'
---

# Senior Staff Developer, AI and Machine Learning at Benevity

- **Company:** Benevity
- **Location:** Toronto, Canada
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-09-25
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-16
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/benevity/195635d2-ce59-45ee-9980-8dd51e34073f

## Job description

Meet Benevity Benevity is the way the world does good, providing companies (and their employees) with technology to take social action on the issues they care about. Through giving, volunteering, grantmaking, employee resource groups and micro-actions, we help most of the Fortune 100 brands build better cultures and use their power for good. We’re also one of the first B Corporations in Canada, meaning we’re as committed to purpose as we are to profits. We have people working all over the world, including Canada, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States and more!

This is a brand new role designed to shape the future of our engineering organization. As Senior Staff Developer - AI and Machine Learning, you will serve as the technical anchor for our machine learning and AI efforts, leading the end-to-end architecture of our GenAI strategy. You will bridge the gap between theoretical research and production-grade engineering—designing the scalable systems that power our model training, deployment, and monitoring. We are looking for a rare combination of deep technical mastery and strategic leadership to ensure our AI initiatives deliver high-impact, measurable business value. What you’ll do:

- Design and oversee the development of robust end-to-end ML architecture, from data ingestion and feature stores to model serving and monitoring.
- Define the long-term roadmap strategy for our AI infrastructure and orchestration framework.
- Oversee the design, implementation, and maintenance of our AI/ML ecosystem.
- Design AI capabilities as extensible, self-service primitives (APIs, SDKs, standardized patterns) that let other domain teams build their own AI-powered features independently.
- Set the standard for MLOps - you will ensure that our ML ecosystem is as testable, maintainable, and scalable as our core application code.
- Cross-functional leadership - by working closely with Product Managers, Data Scientists and ML Engineers to translate business problems into concrete technical requirements.
- Act as a force multiplier for the team by conducting high-level design reviews and mentoring engineers on system design and performance optimization.
- Architect and evolve LLM-powered applications (e.g., copilots, search, assistants, agents), including RAG pipelines, tool integrations, and multi-step reasoning workflows.
- Design and implement robust evaluation frameworks for GenAI systems, incorporating offline benchmarks, online metrics, and human-in-the-loop feedback.
- Drive best practices for prompt engineering, agent design, and orchestration frameworks, ensuring maintainability and performance at scale.
- Establish guardrails and safety mechanisms for GenAI applications, including prompt injection defenses, hallucination mitigation, and responsible AI practices.
- Establish the golden path for model versioning, A/B testing, and automated rollbacks for identifying and mitigating drifts.
- Ensure AI architectural strategy aligns with industry best practices and standards, complies with security policies and industry regulations.
- Identify opportunities for process improvements and implement solutions to enhance platform performance and efficiency.

What you’ll bring:

- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, or a related field, or equivalent deep professional experience.
- 8+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 4+ years architecting and deploying ML models in production at scale.
- 2+ years in a technical leadership role on building scalable platforms, technology transformation and modernization initiatives.
- Proven experience operating at a Staff or Senior level, including technical leadership, architecture ownership, and mentoring engineers.
- Experience building internal platforms/self-service infrastructure for other engineering teams to build on, not just shipping product features directly.
- Deep expertise in MLOps and production ML systems, including model training, evaluation, deployment, monitoring, and lifecycle management.
- Strong experience with cloud platforms (AWS or Google Cloud), including designing and operating scalable, distributed AI/ML workloads.
- Solid understanding of data architecture and data engineering, including data pipelines, feature engineering, data modeling, and large-scale data processing.
- Experience with ML infrastructure and tooling, such as feature stores, experiment tracking, model registries, and orchestration frameworks.
- Proficiency in Python and ML frameworks (e.g., TensorFlow, PyTorch, scikit-learn), with strong software engineering fundamentals.
- Experience with CI/CD and ML deployment pipelines, including automated testing, validation, and rollback strategies for ML systems.
- Familiarity with LLM-based systems and GenAI applications, including systems design, evaluation strategies, and observability for non-deterministic systems.
- Strong understanding of LLM architectures and trade-offs, including model selection, latency, cost, and quality optimization.
- Experience with prompt engineering and prompt orchestration, including techniques like few-shot learning, chain-of-thought, and tool/function calling.
- Experience designing and implementing RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) systems, including embedding strategies, vector databases, and retrieval optimization.
- Experience building agentic workflows, including multi-step reasoning, tool use, and orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex, ADK, or custom frameworks).
- Strong understanding of system design for reliability and scalability, including distributed systems, APIs, and microservices architecture.
- Knowledge of data governance, model governance, and responsible AI practices (security, privacy, bias, explainability).
- Demonstrated ability to translate ambiguous business problems into scalable AI/ML solutions.
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence stakeholders and drive cross-functional alignment.

Great-to-haves:

- Certification in relevant cloud platforms or technologies.

Discover your purpose at work We’re not employees, we’re Benevity-ites. From all locations, backgrounds and walks of life, who deserve more … Innovative work. Growth opportunities. Caring co-workers. And a chance to do work that fills us with a sense of purpose. If the idea of working on tech that helps people do good in the world lights you up ... If you want a career where you’re valued for who you are and challenged to see who you can become … It’s time to join Benevity. We’re so excited to meet you.

Where We Work At Benevity, we embrace a flexible hybrid approach to where we work that empowers our people in a way that supports great work, strong relationships, and personal well-being. For those located near one of our offices, while there’s no set requirement for in-office time, we do value the moments when coming together in person helps us build connection and collaboration. Whether it’s for onboarding, project work, or a chance to align and bond as a team, we trust our people to make thoughtful decisions about when showing up in person matters most.

Join a company where DEIB isn’t a buzzword Diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging are part of Benevity’s DNA. You’ll see the impact of our massive investment in DEIB daily — from our well-supported employee resources groups to the exceptional diversity on our leadership and tech teams. We know that diverse backgrounds, experiences, skills and passions are what move our business and our people forward, so we're committed to creating a culture of belonging with equal opportunities for everyone to shine. That starts with a fair and accessible hiring process. If you want to feel seen, heard and celebrated, you belong at Benevity. Candidates with disabilities who may require accommodations throughout the hiring or assessment process are encouraged to reach out to accommodations@benevity.com.

## About Benevity

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Benevity provides an AI-native enterprise platform for corporate social responsibility, unifying employee giving, volunteering, grants, employee resource groups, challenges, and impact reporting.
- **Entity Type**: Private (late-stage with minority investment; received a $38M minority equity investment from JMI Equity in 2026)
- **Headquarters**: Calgary, Canada
- **Founded**: 2008
- **Founders**: Rick Essex (co-founder)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) software, Employee Engagement, Grants Management, Impact Reporting
- **Target customers**: B2B, primarily large enterprises (965+ purpose-driven clients globally)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: “Be a force of good” — embedding purpose into business strategy while ensuring trust, security, and measurable impact.

## Products & Services
- **Enterprise Impact Platform**: Unified, AI-native SaaS platform for giving, volunteering, grants, employee groups, challenges, and reporting.
- **Donate**: Employee giving module with payroll deduction, company matching, and real-time tax receipts.
- **Volunteer**: Manage and track volunteer hours, including mobile-first experiences for deskless workers.
- **Grants**: Full lifecycle grant management (applications, scoring, disbursement, compliance) with AI-powered grant application summaries.
- **Employee Groups**: ERG management that scales globally, ties participation to business outcomes.
- **Challenges**: Gamified experiences to drive behavior change and daily engagement.
- **Reporting Suite**: Consolidates all impact data into a single “Trusted Impact” number (aggregate dollar value of every hour, dollar, and action).
- **Match Assurance**: Fraud detection and anomaly flagging for donation matching.
- **Global Money Movement**: Disbursement in 200+ countries with 99.7% payment success, automated sanctions/tax/governance compliance, and continuous nonprofit validation for 2.5M organizations.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (private company)
- **Key Metric – Total Funding**: At least $38M minority equity investment from JMI Equity in 2026; earlier Series C round (amount undisclosed) noted in company timeline.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: JMI Equity (minority investor)
- **Growth Signals**:
  - Named to Fast Company Most Innovative Companies 2026.
  - Headcount: 742 employees.
  - $16.6B donated to nonprofits through the platform to date; $20.1B in total grants managed.
  - 965+ purpose-driven clients.
  - 27% average increase in employee participation for clients.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Unified platform**: Replaces 5+ point solutions with one integrated system, reducing vendor sprawl and improving audit readiness.
- **AI-native architecture**: Built on a responsible AI governance framework (not bolted-on), offering features like grant application summaries and receipt extraction.
- **Risk mitigation**: Continuous nonprofit validation (2.5M orgs), intelligent fraud detection on every transaction, and automated sanctions/tax compliance — resulting in an average $100k annual tax savings per client.
- **Global scale**: Disburses funds in local currencies across 200+ countries with 99.7% payment success and full tax reconciliation.
- **Nearly two decades of refinement**: Platform has been built and optimized since 2008, with deep regulatory compliance and secure payment infrastructure.

## Strategic Focus
- **AI-first social impact**: Embedding responsible AI across the entire platform to save time on administrative tasks (e.g., receipt extraction, grant scoring) and allow program managers to focus on strategic impact.
- **Employee mobilization**: Expanding offerings for deskless/remote employees, ERG tools, and challenges to increase participation.
- **Unified impact measurement**: Pushing the “Trusted Impact” number as a universal metric to justify CSR spending to CFOs and boards.
- **Continued product innovation**: Recent launches include Employee Groups (2024) and Challenges (2026).

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Strong emphasis on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) — described as part of Benevity’s DNA with active employee networks (Pride, Black Employee Network) and diverse leadership.
- **Work model**: Hybrid — hub offices for connection/collaboration but flexibility to work in a way that suits individual and team needs.
- **Perks**:
  - 4 weeks of vacation (encouraged to take all days).
  - Flexible health benefits tailored to individual/family needs globally.
  - Parental leave: short-term paid leave, salary top-up for extended leave, and a bonding bonus for any parent.
  - Stock options for all employees (private company).
  - Donation matching and volunteer rewards (company matches donations, rewards volunteer hours with funds to donate).
  - Mental health and wellbeing support: Employee and Family Assistance Program, regular wellbeing sessions, mental health training for leaders.
- **Leadership development**: Internal and external training, ongoing learning opportunities, an online leader hub.
- **Job opportunities**: Currently hiring across multiple roles; careers page at [jobs.ashbyhq.com/benevity](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/benevity).

## Sources
1. [benevity.com](https://benevity.com/)
2. [benevity.com/join-the-team](https://benevity.com/join-the-team)
3. [benevity.com/about-us](https://benevity.com/about-us?hsLang=en)
4. [ca.linkedin.com/company/benevity](https://ca.linkedin.com/company/benevity)
5. [boards.greenhouse.io/benevity](https://boards.greenhouse.io/benevity/jobs/5219028004)

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