Senior Staff Data Engineer, Cohere
CA$380-450k
Salary for candidates based in the US; $275,000 - $350,000 + 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
CA$380-450k
Salary for candidates based in the US; $275,000 - $350,000 + Equity
501-1000 employees
Company mission
To empower businesses to scale innovation, boost productivity, and drive progress that reaches everyone.
Role
Who you are
- 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!
What the job involves
- 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
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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