---
title: 'Senior/Staff Software Engineer (Back-End), Inference at Cohere'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-staff-software-engineer-back-end-inference-cohere-canada-v0kq3fpqr3fd'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-21'
---

# Senior/Staff Software Engineer (Back-End), Inference at Cohere

- **Company:** [Cohere](https://feeny.ai/companies/cohere)
- **Location:** Canada
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-10-15
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-21
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/cohere/14aef6d9-763e-4f56-a498-206fb31dd0c6

## 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? 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.

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

- [Technical Program Manager, AI Delivery for Public Sector & Defense, Germany](https://feeny.ai/job/technical-program-manager-ai-delivery-for-public-sector-defense-germany-cohere-gjx443eccg88) — Germany
- [Delivery Operations Analyst](https://feeny.ai/job/delivery-operations-analyst-cohere-toronto-q8vdq7q6kvfx) — Toronto, Canada
- [Senior Sales Operations Specialist](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-sales-operations-specialist-cohere-new-york-hnfzz9ewkh7q) — New York, NY
- [Partner Development Manager - Berlin](https://feeny.ai/job/partner-development-manager-berlin-cohere-berlin-4cqkmbnx05nn) — Berlin, Germany
- [VP Sales, EMEA](https://feeny.ai/job/vp-sales-emea-cohere-berlin-4ffg4e7jzkkv) — Berlin, Germany
- [VP of Sales - Public Sector](https://feeny.ai/job/vp-of-sales-public-sector-cohere-toronto-ca002p1b67wz) — Toronto, Canada
- [Revenue Enablement Manager - EMEA](https://feeny.ai/job/revenue-enablement-manager-emea-cohere-europe-p17kt7sc7za8) — Europe
- [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