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

The role

You will evolve and scale backend systems for Model Vault, Cohere's inference platform. You will lead architectural initiatives for identity, payments, and platform scalability to support enterprise workloads.

What you will do

• Evolve and scale backend systems including authentication, authorization, deployment management, billing, and metering
• Lead major architectural initiatives across identity, payments, usage systems, and platform scalability
• Build highly reliable control-plane services for provisioning, configuring, scaling, and operating model deployments
• Design APIs and distributed systems with guarantees around correctness, consistency, isolation, failure recovery, idempotency, and observability
• Build security and privacy into the platform architecture including tenant isolation, least-privilege access, and encryption
• Solve complex problems spanning backend systems, cloud infrastructure, security, and AI inference
• Drive projects end-to-end from architecture and threat modeling through implementation and production operations

Required qualifications

• Strong backend engineer with fundamentals in distributed systems, databases, networking, operating systems, and security
• Experience building production systems in languages such as Go, Python, Java, C++, Rust, or similar
• Experience designing and operating production systems where correctness, availability, security, and performance mattered at scale
• Ability to define architecture for ambiguous, high-impact technical problems
• Understanding of concurrency, consistency, caching, queues, rate limiting, backpressure, failure domains, idempotency, and graceful degradation
• Understanding of authentication, authorization, identity, cryptography, secrets, and tenant isolation
• Ability to reason across backend services, APIs, databases, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure
• Ability to debug complex problems across service or system boundaries
• Knowledge of production engineering including instrumentation, capacity planning, migrations, and incident response
• Track record of taking technically difficult projects from an unclear starting point to production

Benefits

• Weekly lunch stipend of $75/£75 or equivalent
• Full health and dental benefits
• Separate budget for mental health
• RRSP matching, 401K, Pension Scheme
• 100% Parental Leave top-up for up to 6 months
• Annual enrichment benefits for arts, culture, fitness/wellness, quality time, and workspace improvement
• Education and learning stipend for conferences, courses, and coaching
• 6 weeks of paid vacation
• Budget for traveling to other offices if remote
• Annual company offsite
• Daily lunch program and snacks for those in office
• $500 home office stipend

About the company

Cohere is a security-first enterprise AI company that builds foundation AI models and end-to-end products. It is a global technology company headquartered in Toronto.