Senior Staff Data Engineer

About the Role

Cohere is looking for a Senior Staff Data Engineer to head the Data Foundation pillar of the Analytics and Data Insights team. You will lead the team that makes Cohere's data trustworthy, governed, and available: the warehouse every analytics surface runs on, the pipelines that keep it fresh, the access model that keeps it secure, and the agentic analytics layer.

Your team owns the full data lifecycle—from ingestion into BigQuery from internal and external sources, orchestration in Airflow and Cloud Run, data warehouse modeling in dbt, to serving results through Looker, export APIs, and customer-facing analytics surfaces, all provisioned as code in Terraform.

Responsibilities

• Build and lead the team: Hire and grow a team of data and infrastructure engineers, set the technical bar, and build leadership capability.
• Set the roadmap: Own and sequence the Data Foundation roadmap across warehouse buildouts, agentic analytics, data governance, and platform initiatives.
• End-to-end platform ownership: Manage ingestion, orchestration on Airflow and Cloud Run, warehouse modeling in BigQuery with dbt (raw, core, mart layers), and serving through Looker, export APIs, and semantic layers via Terraform.
• Data governance: Define access models for humans, service accounts, and agents using VPC service controls, IAM patterns, documented onboarding paths, and audit logging.
• Reliability & operations: Run alerting and anomaly-detection frameworks, maintain data freshness SLAs, lead incident response and postmortems.
• Lead agentic analytics: Integrate semantic layers into internal analytics agents, build evaluation harnesses to measure accuracy, and automate data engineering tasks.
• Company-wide standards: Establish medallion framework architectures, naming conventions, and testing patterns for cross-functional analytics shipping.
• Cross-org partnership: Collaborate with product, engineering, Business Insights, Security, and Legal teams.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience across data engineering, data infrastructure, or analytics platform work, with a proven track record leading platform/infrastructure teams.
• Deep hands-on background in data engineering or infrastructure prior to management, with the ability to inspect Terraform plans, dbt DAGs, and Airflow scheduler logs.
• Production experience with cloud data warehouses (BigQuery, Snowflake, or similar), workflow orchestration (Airflow or similar), and infrastructure as code (Terraform or similar).
• In-depth expertise in data modeling (fact/dimension tables, raw/core/mart layers, semantic layers, data contracts, and testing).
• Proven ability to define roadmaps aligned with business strategy and drive outcomes across cross-functional teams.
• Demonstrated operational excellence across alerting, SLA management, and post-incident reviews.
• Experience with data security and governance (IAM, access management, VPC service controls, compliance workflows).
• Strong enthusiasm for AI research, tools, and autonomous agent infrastructure.
• Comfort operating in ambiguity and working directly with executive leadership.