{"id":3432979,"url":"https://alion.io/job/cohere-forward-deployed-engineer-inference","title":"Forward Deployed Engineer, Inference","company":{"id":270,"name":"Cohere","domain":"cohere.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/cohere","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":85,"open_postings":62,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.387,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":75,"computed_at":"2026-10-31T05:58:55Z"}},"role":"Solutions","role_family":"Solutions","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":240000,"max":415000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":415000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Azure","optional":false},{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"Cohere SDK","optional":false},{"name":"GCP","optional":false},{"name":"Go","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"SLI/SLO/SLA","optional":false},{"name":"TensorRT-LLM","optional":false},{"name":"TPU","optional":false},{"name":"vLLM","optional":false},{"name":"TensorRT","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-28T21:49:48Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-28","last_verified_at":"2026-10-31T19:43:11Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":2,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":2},"description":"Who are we?\nCohere 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.\nWe’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.\nWe 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.\nWe 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!\nWhy this role?\nAre you energized by bridging the gap between frontier AI capability and complex customer reality? Do you want to architect high-performance, resilient machine learning systems directly inside strategic enterprise environments? We are looking for a Staff Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) to join our team. The team is responsible for taking our large language models and making them work reliably, securely, and at peak performance within our customers' custom infrastructure and data perimeters.\nIn this role, you will act as the principal technical translation layer between our core engineering teams and our strategic partners. You will own the architecture for highly ambiguous, customer-specific inference challenges-ranging from multi-tenant model serving to multi-datacenter disaster recovery and custom hardware validation. You will lead technical adoption end-to-end, ensuring our models achieve exceptionally low latency, high throughput, and seamless resilience in the field.\nAs a Forward Deployed Engineer, you will:\nEmbed directly with customer engineering teams to architect the \"connective tissue\" between our AI models and their live, complex production environments.\nDesign advanced model serving topologies, implementing multi-tenant architectures, intelligent model routing, and cross-datacenter failover strategies for multi-cluster environments.\nOptimize \"AI-in-a-box\" and private deployments, balancing localized SRE constraints like Kubernetes multi-cluster scale with raw model performance.\nConduct rigorous benchmarking and profiling of customer LLM workloads, root-causing performance degradation (e.g., slow generation) via metrics, dashboards, and distributed logs.\nAccelerate hardware validation, collaborating with clients to run and support Cohere models on next-generation accelerators (GPUs, TPUs, AMD, and custom ASICs).\nTranslate complex field friction into platform upgrades, delivering prescriptive feedback and contributing directly back to core product features.\nEnsure Day-1 production reliability, assisting customers in establishing sound deployment patterns, SLOs, and observability frameworks.\nYou may be a good fit if you have:\n8+ years of engineering experience running production infrastructure, designing large-scale distributed systems, or deploying enterprise software in complex environments.\nDeep technical depth in production Kubernetes, including orchestration across multi-cluster and hybrid/multi-cloud ecosystems (GCP, Azure, AWS, OCI).\nStrong understanding of LLM architecture and inference dynamics, specifically how attention mechanisms, compute-bound prefill, and memory-bound decode phases dictate live performance.\nHands-on experience with modern inference engines and optimization stacks (e.g., vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, lmd, or Dynamo).\nFamiliarity with distributed serving techniques, such as prefill/decode disaggregated serving, distributed KV caching, and multi-GPU workloads.\nExceptional customer-facing technical leadership, with a proven track record of scoping highly ambiguous problems and steering executive technical stakeholders.\nThe high agency, grit, and adaptability to write same-day production code while managing client-side deployment politics or blockers.\nStrong programming foundations in Python, Go, or C++, comfortable moving fluidly between backend data pipelines and infrastructure layer tuning.\nFull-Time Employees at Cohere enjoy these Perks:\nA weekly lunch stipend of $75/£75 or equivalent in your local currency for lunch.\n\nFull health and dental benefits, including a separate budget for mental health.\n\nRRSP matching, 401K, Pension Scheme.\n\n100% Parental Leave top-up for up to 6 months, for either parent.\n\nAnnual enrichment benefits:\nArts & culture, fitness/wellness, quality time, and a workspace improvement credit.\nEducation & learning stipend for conferences, courses, and coaching.\n\n6 weeks of paid vacation (30 working days!)\n\nBudget for traveling to other offices if you are remote, plus an annual company offsite.\n\nHow and Where We Work:\nCohere 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.\n\nFor those in the office: a daily lunch program, plenty of snacks, and regular community and social events.\n\nFor those not near an office: a co-working benefit so you can work alongside others in your city.\n\nEveryone receives a $500 home office stipend to set up your workspace properly.\n\nIf any of the above doesn’t line up exactly with your experience, we still encourage you to apply.\nWe 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, and we will work together to meet your needs.\nWe 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.\nBeware 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 page.","description_format":"text","description_chars":6413,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":8,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["401k plan","Home office","Parental leave"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["LLM & Generative AI","AI Agents","Foundation Models"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-29T01:29:56Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 10","filings_12m":10,"filings_prev_12m":14,"green_card_filings_12m":0,"median_offered_wage_usd":252500,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-29T16:27:21+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)"],"filings_for_role_12m":1}],"liveness":{"score":90,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.903,"p_room":1,"age_days":2,"expected_fill_days":75,"reasons":["conf:0","velocity","win:early","comp:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-10-31T05:58:55Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":415000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/cohere-forward-deployed-engineer-inference","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/cohere-forward-deployed-engineer-inference.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-31T20:21:16Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":31963,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-01T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":270},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=270"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fcohere-forward-deployed-engineer-inference"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fcohere-forward-deployed-engineer-inference"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fcohere-forward-deployed-engineer-inference"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/cohere-forward-deployed-engineer-inference\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fcohere-forward-deployed-engineer-inference"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":3432979}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"cohere.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":3432979},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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