Head of Data Foundation (AI)

Location: Hybrid in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, New York, or San Francisco; Cohere also describes the role as remote-friendly.

Base salary: USA—California, New York, and Washington: $300,000–$350,000; USA—other states: $275,000–$320,000; Canada: $380,000–$450,000. Equity is offered.

Company

Cohere is a security-first enterprise AI company building foundation AI models and end-to-end products for real-world business problems.

What you will do

• Build, hire, and lead the Data Foundation team, set the technical bar, develop talent, and build leadership capability.
• Own and sequence the Data Foundation roadmap across the warehouse, agentic analytics, data governance, and platform initiatives.
• Own the end-to-end data platform, including ingestion, Airflow and Cloud Run orchestration, BigQuery and dbt modeling, Looker, export APIs, semantic layers, and Terraform provisioning.
• Define governed access for people, service accounts, and agents using VPC service controls, IAM patterns, audit logs, and documented onboarding paths.
• Operate the reliability framework, including alerting, anomaly detection, data freshness SLAs, incident response, and postmortems.
• Lead the internal analytics agent and evaluation harness, establish company-wide analytics standards, and partner with product, engineering, security, legal, and business insights teams.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience across data engineering, data infrastructure, or analytics platform work, with a strong management track record leading data platform or infrastructure teams.
• Hands-on data engineering or infrastructure experience before management, including the ability to read Terraform plans, dbt DAGs, and Airflow scheduler logs.
• Production experience with cloud data warehouses such as BigQuery or Snowflake, workflow orchestration such as Airflow, and infrastructure as code such as Terraform.
• Depth in data modeling, including fact and dimension tables, raw/core/mart separation, semantic layers, tests, and data contracts.
• Experience setting team roadmaps from company or function strategy and delivering outcomes across teams.
• Operational excellence demonstrated through trusted alerting, reliable SLAs, incident response, and effective postmortems.
• Experience with data security and governance, including IAM, access management, VPC service controls or equivalent, audit, and compliance workflows.
• Genuine interest in AI and enthusiasm for building the data foundation used by an AI company and its agents.
• Comfort operating in ambiguity, leading a multi-workstream roadmap, and working directly with executives on priorities.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid and remote-friendly work with offices in Toronto, London, New York City, San Francisco, Montreal, Paris, Berlin, and Seoul.
• Full health and dental benefits, including a separate mental-health budget.
• RRSP matching, 401(k), and pension scheme.
• 100% parental-leave top-up for up to six months for either parent.
• Six weeks of paid vacation, annual enrichment benefits, education and learning stipend, and a $500 home-office stipend.
• Lunch stipend, co-working benefit for employees away from offices, travel budget for other offices, and an annual company offsite.