Senior/Staff Backend Software Engineer, Cohere
Inference
$205-315k
Salary applicable for US candidates, dependent on location. For candidates located in Canada: $290,000 - $400,000 CAD + Offers Equity
Enterprise-grade AI solutions for real-world business problems
Be an early applicant
Enterprise-grade AI solutions for real-world business problems
501-1000 employees
Be an early applicant
$205-315k
Salary applicable for US candidates, dependent on location. For candidates located in Canada: $290,000 - $400,000 CAD + Offers Equity
501-1000 employees
Company mission
To empower businesses to scale innovation, boost productivity, and drive progress that reaches everyone.
Role
Who you are
- 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
- If any of the above doesn’t line up exactly with your experience, we still encourage you to apply
What the job involves
- 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
- 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
Our take
Many businesses are now faced with the challenge of adopting advanced AI safely and securely. While AI tools like ChatGPT are making headlines, companies (especially those in regulated industries such as banking, telecoms, or government services) worry about privacy, compliance, and control over their sensitive data. Cohere addresses these concerns by offering AI solutions that can be trained on a company's internal data and, importantly, run on their own infrastructure rather than relying on external cloud providers. And in a world where data breaches and regulatory scrutiny are constant threats, this focus on trust and security is key.
In a competitive landscape dominated by giants like OpenAI, Google, and Elon Musk's xAI, Cohere is setting itself apart by targeting businesses exclusively. Its approach has earned it contracts with some big names, like Royal Bank of Canada, Fujitsu, LG, Oracle, and Dell. By focusing on reliability and enterprise adoption rather than viral consumer appeal, Cohere has carved out a strong niche for itself.
This isn't going unnoticed either, as the company recently raised $500M, boosting its valuation to $6.8B, and brought on board top talent from Meta and Uber to strengthen its leadership team. Alongside this, it's doubled its annual recurring revenue to $100M in 2025 and is aiming to hit $200M by year-end. With its North platform for AI agents and a lean cost structure compared with larger rivals, Cohere is very much ready for more growth.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
192% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 8 rounds)
Apr 2026
$600m
SERIES E
Sep 2025
$100m
LATE VC
Total funding: $2.1bn
Company benefits
- Six weeks’ paid vacation
- Equity / stock options
- RRSP, 401(k), and Pension Scheme contributions
- Coverage for 100% of your insurance premiums across health, dental, vision, and travel
- Additional coverage for accessing mental health providers/services
- Six months of fully paid parental leave, including adoption and surrogacy
- Financial support for egg freezing and IVF in Canada and the UK
- A monthly fitness and wellness allowance
- Globally dispersed company that supports a remote work culture
- A $2,000 annual education benefit for professional development
- A weekly stipend for meals when working remotely and catered lunch when working from one of our global offices
- A monthly arts and culture allowance
- A monthly quality time allowance
Company HQ
Grange Park, Toronto, ON
Leadership
Aidan Gomez
(Co-Founder & CEO)Aidan received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Oxford in 2024 and has served as Cohere's CEO since co-founding the company in 2019.
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