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

About Cohere

Cohere 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.

Why This Role?

This 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.

Model 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.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Qualifications

• Strong backend engineer with excellent fundamentals in distributed systems, databases, networking, operating systems, and security.
• Strong programming fundamentals and 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 significant scale.
• Ability to take ambiguous, high-impact technical problems, define the right architecture, and drive them through to reliable production systems.
• Strong systems-design instincts with an understanding of concurrency, consistency, caching, queues, rate limiting, backpressure, failure domains, idempotency, and graceful degradation.
• Deep understanding of security boundaries, authentication, authorization, identity, cryptography, secrets, tenant isolation, and implementation trade-offs.
• Comfortable reasoning across backend services, APIs, databases, distributed systems, and the cloud infrastructure they run on.
• Comfortable diving into unfamiliar codebases and debugging complex problems that cross service or system boundaries.
• Attention to the details of production engineering, including instrumentation, capacity planning, migrations, backwards compatibility, incident response, and safe rollouts.
• Comfort challenging existing architecture and evolving foundational components as system needs change.
• Proven track record of taking technically difficult projects from an unclear starting point to production systems.