Senior/Staff Software Engineer (Back-End)

About the role

Cohere is a leader in security-first enterprise AI, building advanced AI models and products to address real-world business challenges. The Senior/Staff Software Engineer will play a critical role in evolving and scaling the backend systems that support the Model Vault platform, ensuring robust architecture and security for enterprise users.

The team values craftsmanship and responsibility, with each member contributing to enhancing model capabilities and customer value. Success in this role will be defined by the ability to lead architectural initiatives, design reliable control-plane services, and integrate security into the platform while solving complex backend challenges.

Skills that matter here

• Go: The role involves building production systems using Go, emphasizing clean and maintainable code.
• Python: Python is one of the key languages for developing backend services and APIs.
• Java: Experience in Java is beneficial for designing and operating scalable production systems.
• C++: C++ is part of the skill set expected for creating high-performance backend solutions.
• Rust: Rust may be utilized for building reliable and secure backend services.

Who this role suits

• A strong backend engineer with a solid foundation in distributed systems and security.
• Someone who enjoys tackling ambiguous technical problems and driving them to completion.
• An individual with a meticulous approach to production engineering and a focus on detail.
• A person comfortable with challenging existing architectures and evolving systems as needed.

From the employer

• 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 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.

• 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.