Senior/Staff Backend Software Engineer (Inference)

Join Cohere as a Senior/Staff Backend Software Engineer, where you'll work on the core systems that shape the Model Vault platform. You'll define the architecture, evolve and scale backend systems, lead major architectural initiatives, and solve complex problems. Enjoy benefits like six weeks of paid vacation, equity options, and a remote work culture.

You care about the details of production engineering, including instrumentation, capacity planning, migrations, backwards compatibility, incident response, and safe rollouts

If any of the above doesn’t line up exactly with your experience, we still encourage you to apply

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.
• Drive projects end-to-end, from architecture and threat modeling through implementation, rollout, production operations, and iteration based on real customer workloads.
• You think deeply about security boundaries and understand authentication, authorization, identity, cryptography, secrets, tenant isolation, and how small implementation choices can create significant security risks
• You have strong systems-design instincts and understand concepts such as concurrency, consistency, caching, queues, rate limiting, backpressure, failure domains, idempotency, and graceful degradation

Requirements

• You are a strong backend engineer with excellent fundamentals in distributed systems, databases, networking, operating systems, and security
• You have a track record of taking technically difficult projects from an unclear starting point to systems that other engineers and customers depend on
• You 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
• You can take ambiguous, high-impact technical problems, define the right architecture, and drive them through to reliable production systems
• You have designed and operated production systems where correctness, availability, security, and performance mattered at significant scale
• You are comfortable reasoning across backend services, APIs, databases, distributed systems, and the cloud infrastructure they run on
• You are comfortable diving into unfamiliar codebases and debugging complex problems that cross service or system boundaries
• You are comfortable challenging existing architecture and evolving foundational components when the system’s needs change

Pay

USD 205,000 - 315,000