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Cohere is a leading enterprise AI company building cutting-edge foundation models and end-to-end products for businesses. This role is for a highly experienced backend software engineer to work on Model Vault, Cohere's inference platform for deploying and operating models securely at enterprise scale.
You will evolve and scale backend systems powering Model Vault, including authentication and authorization, deployment management, billing, metering, and customer lifecycle. You will lead major architectural initiatives across identity, payments, usage systems, platform scalability, and core product foundations. You will build highly reliable control-plane services for provisioning, configuring, scaling, and operating model deployments across clouds and hardware platforms.
Key responsibilities include designing APIs and distributed systems with strong guarantees around correctness, consistency, isolation, failure recovery, idempotency, and observability. You will build security and privacy into platform architecture, including tenant isolation, least-privilege access, auditability, secrets management, encryption, and confidential computing boundaries. You will solve complex problems spanning backend systems, cloud infrastructure, security, and AI inference where conventional SaaS patterns are insufficient. You will drive projects end-to-end from architecture and threat modeling through implementation, rollout, production operations, and iteration based on real customer workloads.
Cohere is remote-friendly with offices in Toronto, London, New York City, San Francisco, Montreal, Paris, Berlin, and Seoul. The company offers a weekly lunch stipend, full health and dental benefits, RRSP/401K matching, 100% parental leave top-up for up to 6 months, annual enrichment benefits (arts/culture, fitness, education stipend), 6 weeks paid vacation, and a $500 home office stipend.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Strong backend engineer with excellent fundamentals in distributed systems, databases, networking, operating systems, and security
- Strong programming fundamentals and production systems experience in Go, Python, Java, C++, Rust, or similar languages; write clean, maintainable, well-tested code
- Designed and operated production systems where correctness, availability, security, and performance mattered at significant scale
- Ability to take ambiguous, high-impact technical problems, define the right architecture, and drive them through to reliable production systems
- Strong systems-design instincts; understand concurrency, consistency, caching, queues, rate limiting, backpressure, failure domains, idempotency, and graceful degradation
- Deep thinking about security boundaries; understand authentication, authorization, identity, cryptography, secrets, tenant isolation
- Comfortable reasoning across backend services, APIs, databases, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure
- Comfortable diving into unfamiliar codebases and debugging complex problems crossing service or system boundaries
- Care about production engineering details: instrumentation, capacity planning, migrations, backwards compatibility, incident response, safe rollouts
- Comfortable challenging existing architecture and evolving foundational components as system needs change
- Track record of taking technically difficult projects from unclear starting points to systems other engineers and customers depend on
About Cohere
AI / Data / Infrastructure — enterprise generative AI models and tooling for businesses.
