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Cohere is a leading enterprise AI company building foundation models and end-to-end products for businesses. As the head of the Data Foundation pillar within the Analytics and Data Insights team, you will lead the infrastructure that makes Cohere's data trustworthy, governed, and available across the organization.
Your team owns the full data lifecycle: ingestion into BigQuery from internal and external sources, orchestration via Airflow and Cloud Run, data warehouse modeling in dbt (raw, core, mart layers), and serving through Looker, export APIs, and customer-facing analytics surfaces. All infrastructure is provisioned as code in Terraform with governance built in from the start: VPC service controls, IAM patterns, and documented access paths that enable fast movement without compromising security.
You will inherit a solid foundation—a Terraform-provisioned warehouse framework, dbt modeling conventions, alerting and incident-response practices, and documentation patterns—and build on it. The roadmap includes scaling the framework across the company, standing up an internal analytics agent with a real evaluation harness, and consolidating institutional knowledge into a self-correcting, self-maintaining system.
Key responsibilities include: building and leading a team of data and infrastructure engineers; setting the Data Foundation roadmap from company strategy; owning the data platform end-to-end (ingestion, orchestration, modeling, serving); defining data governance for humans, service accounts, and agents; operating for reliability with alerting, SLA management, and incident response; leading the agentic analytics program; setting analytics standards across the company; and partnering cross-functionally with product, business insights, security, and legal teams.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 10+ years of experience in data engineering, data infrastructure, or analytics platform work, with a strong management track record leading data platform or infrastructure teams
- Serious hands-on history in data engineering or infrastructure before management; ability to read and understand Terraform plans, dbt DAGs, and Airflow scheduler logs
- Production experience with cloud data warehouses (BigQuery, Snowflake, or similar), workflow orchestration (Airflow or similar), and infrastructure as code (Terraform or similar)
- Depth in data modeling: understanding of fact and dimension tables, raw/core/mart separation, semantic layers, and opinions on where tests and contracts belong
- Track record of setting team roadmaps from company or function strategy and delivering cross-team outcomes with strong cross-functional partnerships
- Demonstrated operational excellence: reliable alerting, met SLAs, incident investigation and documentation
- Exposure to data security and governance: IAM, access management, VPC service controls or equivalent, audit and compliance workflows
- Genuine excitement about AI: follows research, has informed opinions, energized by building data foundations for AI companies and their agents
- Comfort operating in ambiguity, leading multi-workstream roadmaps, and working directly with executives on priorities
About Cohere
AI / Data / Infrastructure — enterprise generative AI models and tooling for businesses.
