---
title: 'Senior Staff Data Engineer at Cohere'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-staff-data-engineer-cohere-toronto-g2rdygzm0wwq'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-04'
---

# Senior Staff Data Engineer at Cohere

- **Company:** [Cohere](https://feeny.ai/companies/cohere)
- **Location:** Toronto, Canada
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-10-22
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-04
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/cohere/4ef5101e-b083-49cd-808a-54c754d159e5

## 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! Why this role? We’re building the foundational infrastructure that will define how the world thinks about and deploys AI, and we want the sharpest, most driven, and most curious people to help us do it. As the head of the Data Foundation pillar of our Analytics and Data Insights team, you’ll lead the team that makes Cohere’s data trustworthy, governed, and available: the warehouse every analytics surface runs on, the pipelines that keep it fresh, the access model that keeps it secure, and the agentic analytics layer that lets anyone at Cohere (and their agents) ask questions of governed data directly. Your team owns the full data lifecycle. You’ll run ingestion into BigQuery from internal and external data sources, orchestrate it in Airflow and Cloud Run, model the data warehouse in dbt, and serve the results through Looker, export APIs, and customer-facing analytics surfaces. Everything is provisioned as code in Terraform, and governance is part of the design: VPC service controls, IAM patterns, and documented access paths that let people and agents move fast without putting data at risk. This role is both highly visible and highly impactful, and you’ll inherit a solid structure on which to build the rest of the stack: a Terraform-provisioned warehouse framework, dbt modeling conventions, an alerting and incident-response practice, and documentation patterns to keep everything discoverable. The roadmap is set with big bets in flight: scaling that framework across the company, standing up an internal analytics agent with a real eval harness, and consolidating institutional knowledge into a self-correcting and self-maintaining system that keeps context centralized, current, and documented, rather than dispersed and in people’s heads.

## Responsibilities

As the head of the Data Foundation pillar, you will:

- Build and lead the team. Hire and grow a team of data and infrastructure engineers; set the technical bar; develop strong talent and raise team performance, building leadership capability beneath you.
- Set the roadmap from company strategy. Own and sequence the Data Foundation roadmap: the warehouse buildout, the agentic analytics program, data governance, and the platform work that unblocks our other pillars. You’ll make the trade-offs and carry the cross-functional impact that comes with them.
- Own the data platform end to end. Ingestion (managed connectors and an open-source connector framework), orchestration on Airflow and Cloud Run, warehouse modeling in BigQuery with dbt (raw, core, mart layers), and serving through Looker, export APIs, and semantic layers. All of it provisioned as code in Terraform.
- Own data governance. Define how humans, service accounts, and agents get access to governed data: VPC service controls, IAM patterns, documented onboarding paths, audit logs, and sensitive requests (including legal holds) handled to deadline.
- Operate for reliability. Run the alerting and anomaly-detection framework, own data freshness SLAs, lead incident response and postmortems, and turn every incident into a durable standard so the same class of failure doesn’t recur.
- Lead the agentic analytics program. Wire the semantic layer into an internal analytics agent, build the eval harness that measures its accuracy, and make the eval-driven call on where AI earns its way into production. Apply the same discipline to automating data engineering work itself.
- Set the standard for analytics across the company. The medallion framework, naming conventions, and testing patterns your team maintains become the way other teams ship analytics data. You’ll onboard new domains onto it and keep the docs accurate to how the systems actually work.
- Partner across the org. Work with the North product and engineering teams on the analytics surfaces that ship in the product (including a customer-facing analytics export), with Business Insights on marts for the business, with Security on data governance, and with Legal on compliance-critical data requests.

## Qualifications

You may be a good fit, if you have:

- 10+ years of experience across 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. You can still read a Terraform plan, a dbt DAG, or an Airflow scheduler log and ask the question that matters
- 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: you think in fact and dimension tables, raw/core/mart separation, and semantic layers, and you have opinions on where tests and contracts belong
- A record of setting a team’s roadmap from company or function strategy and delivering outcomes that span teams, with the cross-functional partnerships to match
- Operational excellence you can point to: alerting you trust, SLAs you meet, incidents you run to ground and write up so they teach
- Exposure to data security and governance: IAM, access management, VPC service controls or equivalent, audit and compliance workflows
- Genuine excitement about AI: you follow the research, have opinions, and are energized by building the data foundation an AI company (and its AI agents) runs on
- Comfort operating in ambiguity, leading a multi-workstream roadmap, and working directly with executives on priorities

If some of the above doesn’t line up perfectly with your experience, we still encourage you to apply!

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

- [Head of Sales, Defense & Intelligence](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-sales-defense-intelligence-cohere-toronto-cpe83g03g0qa) — Toronto, Canada
- [Data Annotation Specialist, Safety](https://feeny.ai/job/data-annotation-specialist-safety-cohere-canada-exy891fqvrm8) — Canada
- [Senior Sales Operations Specialist](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-sales-operations-specialist-cohere-washington-hnfzz9ewkh7q) — Washington, DC
- [Senior Security Operations Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-security-operations-engineer-cohere-united-states-6xezx0mmz7h8) — United States
- [Senior Product Designer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-product-designer-cohere-toronto-fcx5g8t1pa7e) — Toronto, Canada
- [Technical Program Manager, AI Delivery (Dammam)](https://feeny.ai/job/technical-program-manager-ai-delivery-dammam-cohere-saudi-arabia-kkj5vxpy363w) — Saudi Arabia
- [Senior Security Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-security-engineer-cohere-toronto-6t7bm5pf49bw) — Toronto, Canada
- [Forward Deployed Engineer, Infrastructure Specialist (North America)](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-infrastructure-specialist-north-america-cohere-toronto-jv5q28dj6a3k) — Toronto, Canada
- [Business Operations Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/business-operations-lead-cohere-new-york-ndttwqdkdz37) — New York, NY
- [Talent Sourcer, G&A](https://feeny.ai/job/talent-sourcer-g-a-cohere-new-york-fkqk63v7cf4p) — New York, NY