---
title: 'Forward Deployed Engineer, Sovereign AI at Cohere'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-sovereign-ai-cohere-ottawa-erdydvrm18tb'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-14'
---

# Forward Deployed Engineer, Sovereign AI at Cohere

- **Company:** [Cohere](https://feeny.ai/companies/cohere)
- **Location:** Ottawa, Canada
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-09-01
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-14
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/cohere/556467eb-3dc8-46e2-b015-277872210997/application

**Skills:** Python, Agent Development, RAG, Client-side Development, Server-side Development, Backend Development, Infrastructure

> Build and ship features for Cohere's AI workspace platform, developing autonomous agents that interact with sensitive enterprise data. The role involves end-to-end deployment of North in private cloud and on-premises environments for Canadian public sector clients, requiring close collaboration with customer enginee...

## Job description

Who are we? Cohere is the leading security-first enterprise AI company. We build cutting-edge foundation AI models and end-to-end products that are designed to solve real-world business problems. We’re training and deploying frontier models for enterprises who are building AI systems. We believe that our work is instrumental to the widespread adoption of AI and we are looking for folks that want to be part of that. We obsess over what we build. Each one of us is responsible for contributing to increasing the capabilities of our models and the value they drive for our customers. Cohere is a team of researchers, engineers, designers, and more, who are all passionate about their craft. We are a global technology company headquartered in Toronto with key offices in London, New York City, San Francisco, Montreal, Paris, Berlin and Seoul. Join us!

About North: [North](https://cohere.com/north) is Cohere's cutting-edge AI workspace platform, designed to revolutionize the way enterprises utilize AI. It offers a secure and customizable environment, allowing companies to deploy AI while maintaining control over sensitive data. North integrates seamlessly with existing workflows, providing a trusted platform that connects AI agents with workplace tools and applications.

Why This Role? Cohere’s team partners with Canadian public sector organisations to unlock transformative value through secure, ethical deployment of Generative AI (GenAI) solutions. We work collaboratively to address complex societal challenges while maintaining the highest standards of data security and compliance. You will work directly with public sector customers to quickly understand their greatest problems and design and implement solutions using Cohere's stack. This role offers a unique opportunity to shape how enterprises harness the power of AI in real-world applications. As a bridge between our core North product and our clients’ engineering teams, you’ll be at the forefront of solving complex problems and securely integrating AI into critical sectors. We are seeking engineers with diverse skill sets, including backend, infrastructure, agent development, and deployments, who deeply care about customers and want to work at the cutting edge of Agentic AI.

Location: Ottawa (proximity to government customers), 20-40% travel anticipated.

Security Clearance: Eligibility for Active Top Secret clearance is needed for this position, candidates eligible and willing to obtain clearance will also be considered. More information about Canadian Security Clearance can be found [here](https://www.canada.ca/en/public-services-procurement/services/industrial-security/security-requirements-contracting/personnel-security-screening/processes/security-clearance-request.html).

In this role, you will:

- Build and ship features for North, our AI workspace platform
- Develop autonomous agents that talk to sensitive enterprise data
- Experiment at a high velocity and with a high level of quality to engage our customers and ultimately deliver solutions that exceed their expectations
- Work across the entire product lifecycle from conceptualization through production
- Lead end-to-end deployment of North in private cloud and on-premises environments, including planning, configuration, testing, and rollout

You may be a good fit if:

- You have experience with and enjoy working directly with customers
- You have shipped (lots of) Python in production
- You have built and deployed highly performant client-side or server-side RAG/agentic applications
- You have strong coding abilities and are comfortable working across the stack. You’re able to read and understand, and even fix issues outside of the main code base
- You excel in fast-paced environments and can execute while priorities and objectives are a moving target

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.

We strive to create an inclusive work environment for all; we welcome applicants from all backgrounds and are committed to providing equal opportunities. Should you require any accommodations during the recruitment process, please submit an[Accommodations Request Form](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/12a6IrLdF3kI2nonKSr4tiFuz18rLQbaeYV-JM9L4o9Q/edit), and we will work together to meet your needs.

We may use AI-enabled tools to screen and assess applicants against the criteria for this position. This helps our recruiters identify potentially qualified candidates, but it doesn't limit the applications our recruiters may review or consider.

Beware of Scams: Cohere will never ask for payment or third-party services (e.g., CV writing) as part of our hiring process. All legitimate roles are listed on the Cohere careers page and LinkedIn only, with all communications from Cohere employees coming from an @cohere.com or @cw.cohere email alias. If jobs are viewed on other sites then please verify these through our [official careers](https://cohere.com/careers) page.

## About Cohere

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Cohere builds enterprise-grade AI foundation models and secure, customizable AI solutions that allow businesses to deploy generative, retrieval, and speech capabilities on their own infrastructure.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series D, raised ~$1B as of 2024)
- **Headquarters**: Toronto, Canada (with offices in New York, London, San Francisco, Montreal, Paris, Seoul)
- **Founded**: 2019
- **Founders**: Aidan Gomez (CEO), Nick Frosst, Ivan Zhang

## Core Business
- Primary industry: Enterprise AI / Artificial Intelligence
- Target customers: B2B, primarily large enterprises and public sector organizations across finance, healthcare, manufacturing, telecommunications, energy, and government
- Mission statement: “Do whatever it takes to scale intelligence to serve humanity” – AI’s highest purpose is to enhance human wellbeing by empowering businesses to scale innovation, boost productivity, and drive progress.

## Products & Services
- **Command**: High-performance generative model with agentic capabilities, reasoning, tool orchestration, and multimodal intelligence – supports 49 languages.
- **Rerank**: Relevance-based search optimization that personalizes and refines results based on user needs.
- **Embed**: Semantic text representation for accurate document comparison and fast, scalable retrieval.
- **Transcribe**: High-fidelity speech-to-text engine supporting 14 languages, robust to real-world conversational environments.
- **North**: Turnkey AI workplace platform launched in 2025, offering agentic capabilities and advanced retrieval to automate tasks and surface insights securely grounded in enterprise data.
- **Cohere Labs**: Open science initiative with 4,500+ community members and 100+ published research papers.

## Competitive Advantages
- Full data sovereignty and security: Models can be deployed in a virtual private cloud (VPC), on-premises, or in a dedicated Cohere-managed Model Vault.
- Highly customizable: Clients can train on proprietary data and build unique AI solutions for specific use cases, infrastructure, and languages.
- Multi-layered protection with industry-certified security standards.
- Strong open science foundation (Cohere Labs) and research output (100+ papers).

## Strategic Focus
- Agentic AI for enterprise: Unified reasoning, tool orchestration, and multimodal intelligence in a single model.
- Sovereign AI workplace: Ensuring enterprises maintain control over their data and infrastructure.
- Expanding the North platform as a turnkey productivity solution.
- Global expansion with offices in North America, Europe, and Asia.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: “Flexible, collaborative, and built on trust.” Values of Autonomy, Openness, and Momentum.
- **Remote/hybrid**: Globally dispersed company that supports remote work; employees can work from anywhere. Offices in seven cities with catered lunches, snacks, and social events. Teams have budgets for offsite gatherings.
- **Benefits**:
  - Six weeks’ paid vacation
  - Equity/stock options (all co-owners)
  - Retirement benefits
  - Six months fully paid parental leave (including adoption/surrogacy)
  - Medical, health insurance, vision, travel coverage (varies by location)
  - Mental health provider access
  - Fertility/family planning financial support
  - Monthly fitness/wellness allowance
  - $2,000 annual education benefit for conferences/courses
  - Annual arts & culture allowance
  - Monthly quality time allowance
  - One-time workplace improvement stipend for home office
  - Monthly co-working benefit for remote employees
  - Weekly meal stipend for remote workers
- **Interview process**: Clear and collaborative – application review, recruiter conversation, take-home assignment, hiring manager, final team rounds. Video conference-friendly.

## Sources
1. [cohere.com](https://cohere.com/) – Product overview, security, and industry solutions
2. [cohere.com/about](https://cohere.com/about) – Company history, founders, mission, funding, team
3. [cohere.com/careers](https://cohere.com/careers) – Benefits, culture, FAQs, remote policy
4. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/cohere](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/cohere) – Current job openings and internships
5. [linkedin.com/company/cohere-ai](https://www.linkedin.com/company/cohere-ai) – Company page, acquisitions, revenue reference

## Other roles at Cohere

- [VP Sales, EMEA](https://feeny.ai/job/vp-sales-emea-cohere-berlin-4ffg4e7jzkkv) — Berlin, Germany
- [Member of Technical Staff - Post-training (Data Infrastructure)](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-post-training-data-infrastructure-cohere-united-states-dr8vafgpx7nf) — United States
- [Member of Technical Staff - Post-Training (Reinforcement Learning & Generalization)](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-post-training-reinforcement-learning-generalization-1vd76tqp4ra3) — Europe
- [Senior Full-Stack Engineer, Cohere Dashboard](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-full-stack-engineer-cohere-dashboard-cohere-toronto-xm1k15qskssk) — Toronto, Canada
- [Chief of Staff](https://feeny.ai/job/chief-of-staff-cohere-toronto-n71nysfsh0gk) — Toronto, Canada
- [Forward Deployed Engineer, Agentic Platform (Korea)](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-agentic-platform-korea-cohere-south-korea-a6z8dt0m1ffn) — South Korea
- [Product & Technology Communications Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/product-technology-communications-manager-cohere-san-francisco-jc97yxz7xxz8) — San Francisco, CA
- [Design Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/design-engineer-cohere-united-states-j2dx77msgwz8) — United States
- [Office Manager & Security Coordinator](https://feeny.ai/job/office-manager-security-coordinator-cohere-ottawa-b9cwxcc08c0b) — Ottawa, Canada
- [Senior Account Executive - Technology](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-account-executive-technology-cohere-san-francisco-cr5djp941ah5) — San Francisco, CA