5-7 years of experience in back-end engineering with a focus on distributed systems and security.
Proficiency in programming languages such as Go, Python, Java, C++, or Rust.
Experience designing and operating production systems at scale with a focus on correctness and availability.
Strong understanding of security principles including authentication, authorization, and cryptography.
Ability to tackle ambiguous technical challenges and drive them to reliable production solutions.
Familiarity with concepts like concurrency, caching, and failure recovery.
Responsibilities
Evolve and scale backend systems for Model Vault, focusing on authentication, deployment management, and billing.
Lead architectural initiatives across identity, payments, and platform scalability.
Build reliable control-plane services for model deployments across various infrastructures.
Design APIs and distributed systems ensuring correctness and observability.
Integrate security and privacy measures into the platform architecture.
Solve complex backend and cloud infrastructure problems that require innovative solutions.
Drive projects from architecture through to production operations and iteration.
Benefits
Weekly lunch stipend of $75/£75 or equivalent.
Comprehensive health and dental benefits, including mental health support.
Retirement savings plans with matching contributions.
100% parental leave top-up for up to 6 months.
Annual enrichment benefits for arts, fitness, and education.
6 weeks of paid vacation (30 working days).
Budget for travel to other offices and an annual company offsite.
Full Job Description
Why this role?
This role is for a highly experienced Back-End Software Engineer who wants to work on core systems that shape how the platform (Model Vault) operates. You will help define the architecture of the platform where reliability, security, performance, and simplicity all matter, and where many of the problems do not have off-the-shelf solutions.
Model Vault is Cohere's inference platform for deploying and operating models securely at enterprise scale. The team owns the systems between a customer and the underlying AI infrastructure, including identity, deployments, metering, billing, security, privacy, and confidential computing. We are strengthening these systems as Model Vault grows, with the goal of scaling to millions of users and supporting some of the world's most demanding enterprise workloads.
As a Senior/Staff Software Engineer, you will:
Evolve and scale the backend systems that power Model Vault, including authentication and authorization, deployment management, billing, metering, and customer lifecycle.
Lead major architectural initiatives across identity, payments, usage systems, platform scalability, and other core product foundations.
Build highly reliable control-plane services for provisioning, configuring, scaling, and operating model deployments across clouds and hardware platforms.
Design APIs and distributed systems with strong guarantees around correctness, consistency, isolation, failure recovery, idempotency, and observability.
Build security and privacy into the platform architecture, including tenant isolation, least-privilege access, auditability, secrets management, encryption, and confidential computing boundaries.
Solve complex problems that span backend systems, cloud infrastructure, security, and AI inference, where conventional SaaS patterns are often not enough.
Drive projects end-to-end, from architecture and threat modeling through implementation, rollout, production operations, and iteration based on real customer workloads.
You may be a good fit if:
You are a strong backend engineer with excellent fundamentals in distributed systems, databases, networking, operating systems, and security.
You have strong programming fundamentals and experience building production systems in languages such as Go, Python, Java, C++, Rust, or similar. You write clean, maintainable, well-tested code and make thoughtful tradeoffs between simplicity, performance, and correctness.
You have designed and operated production systems where correctness, availability, security, and performance mattered at significant scale.
You can take ambiguous, high-impact technical problems, define the right architecture, and drive them through to reliable production systems.
You have strong systems-design instincts and understand concepts such as concurrency, consistency, caching, queues, rate limiting, backpressure, failure domains, idempotency, and graceful degradation.
You think deeply about security boundaries and understand authentication, authorization, identity, cryptography, secrets, tenant isolation, and how small implementation choices can create significant security risks.
You are comfortable reasoning across backend services, APIs, databases, distributed systems, and the cloud infrastructure they run on.
You are comfortable diving into unfamiliar codebases and debugging complex problems that cross service or system boundaries.
You care about the details of production engineering, including instrumentation, capacity planning, migrations, backwards compatibility, incident response, and safe rollouts.
You are comfortable challenging existing architecture and evolving foundational components when the system's needs change.
You have a track record of taking technically difficult projects from an unclear starting point to systems that other engineers and customers depend on.
Full-Time Employees at Cohere enjoy these Perks:
A weekly lunch stipend of $75/£75 or equivalent in your local currency for lunch.
Full health and dental benefits, including a separate budget for mental health.
RRSP matching, 401K, Pension Scheme.
100% Parental Leave top-up for up to 6 months, for either parent.
Annual enrichment benefits: Arts & culture, fitness/wellness, quality time, and a workspace improvement credit. Education & learning stipend for conferences, courses, and coaching.
6 weeks of paid vacation (30 working days!)
Budget for traveling to other offices if you are remote, plus an annual company offsite.
How and Where We Work:
Cohere is remote-friendly, but we also have offices in Toronto, London, New York City, San Francisco, Montreal, Paris, Berlin and Seoul with more opening soon.
For those in the office: a daily lunch program, plenty of snacks, and regular community and social events.
For those not near an office: a co-working benefit so you can work alongside others in your city.
Everyone receives a $500 home office stipend to set up your workspace properly.
If any of the above doesn't line up exactly with your experience, we still encourage you to apply.
