{"id":2630330,"url":"https://alion.io/job/cohere-seniorstaff-software-engineer-back-end-inference","title":"Senior/Staff Software Engineer (Back-End), 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":87,"open_postings":69,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.333,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":73,"computed_at":"2026-10-16T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"board_field","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"inferred","locations":["San Francisco, United States","New York, United States","Ottawa, Canada","Toronto, Canada","Montreal, Canada"],"countries":["US","CA"],"hiring_countries":["US","CA"],"hiring_countries_total":2,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":180000,"max_usd":317000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":22},"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"Go","optional":false},{"name":"Java","optional":false},{"name":"Least Privilege","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Rust","optional":false},{"name":"Threat Modeling","optional":false},{"name":"Vault","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-15T14:07:47Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-15","last_verified_at":"2026-10-16T02:32:00Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":0,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":0},"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?\nThis 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.\nModel 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.\nAs a Senior/Staff Software Engineer, you will:\nEvolve and scale the backend systems that power Model Vault, including authentication and authorization, deployment management, billing, metering, and customer lifecycle.\n\nLead major architectural initiatives across identity, payments, usage systems, platform scalability, and other core product foundations.\n\nBuild highly reliable control-plane services for provisioning, configuring, scaling, and operating model deployments across clouds and hardware platforms.\n\nDesign APIs and distributed systems with strong guarantees around correctness, consistency, isolation, failure recovery, idempotency, and observability.\n\nBuild security and privacy into the platform architecture, including tenant isolation, least-privilege access, auditability, secrets management, encryption, and confidential computing boundaries.\n\nSolve complex problems that span backend systems, cloud infrastructure, security, and AI inference, where conventional SaaS patterns are often not enough.\n\nDrive projects end-to-end, from architecture and threat modeling through implementation, rollout, production operations, and iteration based on real customer workloads.\n\nYou may be a good fit if:\nYou are a strong backend engineer with excellent fundamentals in distributed systems, databases, networking, operating systems, and security.\n\nYou 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.\n\nYou have designed and operated production systems where correctness, availability, security, and performance mattered at significant scale.\n\nYou can take ambiguous, high-impact technical problems, define the right architecture, and drive them through to reliable production systems.\n\nYou have strong systems-design instincts and understand concepts such as concurrency, consistency, caching, queues, rate limiting, backpressure, failure domains, idempotency, and graceful degradation.\n\nYou think deeply about security boundaries and understand authentication, authorization, identity, cryptography, secrets, tenant isolation, and how small implementation choices can create significant security risks.\n\nYou are comfortable reasoning across backend services, APIs, databases, distributed systems, and the cloud infrastructure they run on.\n\nYou are comfortable diving into unfamiliar codebases and debugging complex problems that cross service or system boundaries.\n\nYou care about the details of production engineering, including instrumentation, capacity planning, migrations, backwards compatibility, incident response, and safe rollouts.\n\nYou are comfortable challenging existing architecture and evolving foundational components when the system’s needs change.\n\nYou have a track record of taking technically difficult projects from an unclear starting point to systems that other engineers and customers depend on.\n\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":6893,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"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"},{"name":"Canada","iso":"CA","kind":"country"},{"name":"New York","iso":null,"kind":"city"},{"name":"San Francisco","iso":null,"kind":"city"},{"name":"Toronto","iso":null,"kind":"city"},{"name":"Ottawa","iso":null,"kind":"city"},{"name":"Montreal","iso":null,"kind":"city"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["LLM & Generative AI","AI Agents","Foundation Models"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-15T15:59:16Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"CA","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"Positions approved through LMIA in 12 months: 8","filings_12m":8,"filings_prev_12m":1,"green_card_filings_12m":null,"median_offered_wage_usd":null,"route":"High Wage; Global Talent Stream","cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-03T21:10:52+00:00","sources":["ESDC: employers issued a positive LMIA"],"filings_for_role_12m":4}],"liveness":{"score":90,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.903,"p_room":1,"age_days":0,"expected_fill_days":73,"reasons":["conf:3","velocity","win:early","comp:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-10-16T05:45:00Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/cohere-seniorstaff-software-engineer-back-end-inference","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/cohere-seniorstaff-software-engineer-back-end-inference.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-16T06:32:36Z","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":4289,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-17T00:00:00Z"}},"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-seniorstaff-software-engineer-back-end-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-seniorstaff-software-engineer-back-end-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-seniorstaff-software-engineer-back-end-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-seniorstaff-software-engineer-back-end-inference\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fcohere-seniorstaff-software-engineer-back-end-inference"}]}