Senior Back-End Software Engineer (AI)

Location: Remote in Canada or the United States; listed locations include Montreal, New York, Ottawa, San Francisco, and Toronto.

Salary: USA—California, New York, and Washington: $225,000–$315,000 base salary; other US states: $205,000–$275,000; Canada: CA$290,000–CA$400,000. Equity is offered.

Company

Cohere is an enterprise AI company developing foundation models and secure AI products for business use.

What you will do

• Evolve and scale the backend systems powering Model Vault, including authentication, authorization, deployments, billing, metering, and customer lifecycle.
• Lead architectural initiatives across identity, payments, usage systems, platform scalability, and core product foundations.
• Build 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 for correctness, consistency, isolation, recovery, idempotency, and observability.
• Build security and privacy into the platform through tenant isolation, least-privilege access, auditability, secrets management, encryption, and confidential computing.
• Drive projects from architecture and threat modeling through implementation, rollout, production operations, and iteration based on customer workloads.

Requirements

• Strong backend engineering fundamentals in distributed systems, databases, networking, operating systems, and security.
• Production programming experience with Go, Python, Java, C++, Rust, or similar languages.
• Experience designing and operating large-scale production systems where correctness, availability, security, and performance are critical.
• Strong systems-design knowledge, including concurrency, consistency, caching, queues, rate limiting, backpressure, failure domains, idempotency, and graceful degradation.
• Understanding of authentication, authorization, identity, cryptography, secrets, tenant isolation, instrumentation, capacity planning, migrations, and incident response.
• Remote work is available in Canada or the United States.

Culture & Benefits

• Remote-friendly environment with offices in Toronto, London, New York City, San Francisco, Montreal, Paris, Berlin, and Seoul.
• Full health and dental benefits, including a mental health budget.
• RRSP matching, 401(k), and pension scheme options.
• Six weeks of paid vacation, parental leave top-up for up to six months, and annual enrichment benefits.
• Education and learning stipend for conferences, courses, and coaching.
• Co-working benefit, home office stipend, travel budget for remote employees, and an annual company offsite.