Role overview

Cohere is an enterprise AI company building foundation models and products for real-world business applications. This Senior/Staff Software Engineer role focuses on the back-end systems powering Model Vault, Cohere’s inference platform for secure enterprise-scale model deployment and operation.

Key responsibilities

Develop and scale backend systems that handle authentication, authorization, deployment management, billing, metering, and customer lifecycle operations.
Lead major architectural initiatives across identity systems, payments infrastructure, usage tracking, platform scalability, and core product foundations.
Build reliable control-plane services for provisioning, configuring, scaling, and operating model deployments across multiple cloud providers and hardware platforms.
Design APIs and distributed systems with strong guarantees around correctness, consistency, isolation, failure recovery, idempotency, and observability.
Integrate security and privacy into platform architecture, including tenant isolation, least-privilege access, auditability, secrets management, encryption, and confidential computing.
Tackle complex problems spanning backend systems, cloud infrastructure, security, and AI inference where standard SaaS approaches are insufficient.
Drive projects from architecture and threat modeling through implementation, production rollout, operations, and iteration based on customer workloads.

Requirements

Strong foundation in distributed systems, databases, networking, operating systems, and security fundamentals.
Production experience building systems in languages such as Go, Python, Java, C++, Rust, or equivalent, with ability to write clean, maintainable, well-tested code.
Demonstrated experience designing and operating production systems where correctness, availability, security, and performance were critical at scale.
Expertise in systems design concepts including concurrency, consistency, caching, queues, rate limiting, backpressure, failure domains, idempotency, and graceful degradation.
Deep understanding of security boundaries, authentication, authorization, identity, cryptography, secrets management, and tenant isolation.
Comfort reasoning across backend services, APIs, databases, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure; ability to debug complex problems crossing service boundaries.
Track record of delivering technically difficult projects from ambiguous starting points to reliable systems that engineers and customers depend on.

What makes this role worth considering

You will work on foundational systems at a company deploying frontier AI models for enterprise customers, with problems that require custom solutions beyond conventional patterns. Cohere maintains offices in Toronto, London, New York City, San Francisco, Montreal, Paris, Berlin, and Seoul, offering flexibility through remote work options or co-working benefits, plus a $500 home office stipend. Full-time employees receive comprehensive benefits including health and dental coverage, a $75 weekly lunch stipend, six weeks of paid vacation, parental leave top-up, education stipends, and annual enrichment credits for wellness and travel.