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

Cohere· Inference
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Remote$205k - $315k + equityFull-timePosted 4d ago

About the role

Senior/Staff Backend Engineer focused on core systems for Cohere's inference platform (Model Vault), shaping architecture for reliability, security, performance, and scalability across 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 fundamentals in distributed systems, databases, networking, operating systems, and security.
  • Experience building production systems in Go, Python, Java, C++, Rust, or similar; clean, maintainable, well-tested code with thoughtful tradeoffs.
  • Designed and operated production systems where correctness, availability, security, and performance mattered at significant scale.
  • Ability to define right architecture for ambiguous, high-impact problems and drive to reliable production systems.
  • Strong systems-design instincts: concurrency, consistency, caching, queues, rate limiting, backpressure, failure domains, idempotency, graceful degradation.
  • Security-focused: authentication, authorization, identity, cryptography, secrets, tenant isolation, and related risks.
  • Comfort reasoning across backend services, APIs, databases, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure.
  • Comfort debugging across unfamiliar codebases and cross-boundary problems.
  • Attention to production engineering details: instrumentation, capacity planning, migrations, backwards compatibility, incident response, safe rollouts.
  • Willingness to evolve architecture and foundational components as needs change.
  • Track record of delivering technically difficult projects from unclear starting points to dependable systems.

Skills

Required:Backend developmentProgramming languagesSecurity and privacy by design

Benefits

  • A weekly lunch stipend of $75/£75 or equivalent in local currency
  • Full health and dental benefits including mental health budget
  • RRSP matching, 401K, Pension Scheme
  • 100% Parental Leave top-up for up to 6 months
  • Annual enrichment benefits (arts & culture, fitness, workspace improvement, education & learning stipend)
  • 6 weeks of paid vacation (30 working days)
  • Travel budget to other offices and annual company offsite
  • Remote-friendly with office options and coworking benefit
  • $500 home office stipend to set up workspace
Last updated Oct 21, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
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