Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Staff Software Engineer role sits at the infrastructure layer that many SaaS businesses increasingly depend on as AI features move from experimentation into production. The remit spans multi-cloud GPU and TPU superclusters, Kubernetes at scale, and the reliability work needed to serve model training and evaluation as an internal platform, which is a defining capability for AI-native SaaS.
From a SaaS career perspective, the position builds durable expertise in operating complex, customer-impacting systems where uptime, throughput, and observability translate directly into product capability. The blend of performance engineering, infrastructure-as-code, and self-service tooling mirrors the platform engineering direction across modern SaaS, while close partnership with researchers sharpens the ability to translate evolving workloads into stable primitives.
The role is best suited to senior engineers who prefer deep technical ownership over core infrastructure and are comfortable balancing build and run responsibilities, including on-call participation. It will appeal to those who like working across layers, from Linux and networking details to developer-facing interfaces, and who want their work to enable other teams to deliver AI functionality reliably.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
Who are we?
Our mission is to scale intelligence to serve humanity. We’re training and deploying frontier models for developers and enterprises who are building AI systems to power magical experiences like content generation, semantic search, RAG, and agents. We believe that our work is instrumental to the widespread adoption of AI.
We obsess over what we build. Each one of us is responsible for contributing to increasing the capabilities of our models and the value they drive for our customers. We like to work hard and move fast to do what’s best for our customers.
Cohere is a team of researchers, engineers, designers, and more, who are passionate about their craft. Each person is one of the best in the world at what they do. We believe that a diverse range of perspectives is a requirement for building great products.
Join us on our mission and shape the future!
Why this team?
The internal infrastructure team is responsible for building world-class infrastructure and tools used to train, evaluate and serve Cohere's foundational models. By joining our team, you will work in close collaboration with AI researchers to support their AI workload needs on the cutting edge, with a strong focus on stability, scalability, and observability. You will be responsible for building and operating superclusters across multiple clouds. Your work will directly accelerate the development of industry-leading AI models that power Cohere's platform North.
Please Note: All of our infrastructure roles require participating in a 24x7 on-call rotation, where you are compensated for your on-call schedule.
As a Staff Software Engineer, you will:
Build and scale ML-optimized HPC infrastructure: Deploy and manage Kubernetes-based GPU/TPU superclusters across multiple clouds, ensuring high throughput and low-latency performance for AI workloads.
Optimize for AI/ML training: Collaborate with cloud providers to fine-tune infrastructure for cost efficiency, reliability, and performance, leveraging technologies like RDMA, NCCL, and high-speed interconnects.
Troubleshoot and resolve complex issues: Proactively identify and resolve infrastructure bottlenecks, performance degradation, and system failures to ensure minimal disruption to AI/ML workflows.
Enable researchers with self-service tools: Design intuitive interfaces and workflows that allow researchers to monitor, debug, and optimize their training jobs independently.
Drive innovation in ML infrastructure: Work closely with AI researchers to understand emerging needs (e.g., JAX, PyTorch, distributed training) and translate them into robust, scalable infrastructure solutions.
Champion best practices: Advocate for observability, automation, and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) across the organization, ensuring systems are maintainable and resilient.
Mentorship and collaboration: Share expertise through code reviews, documentation, and cross-team collaboration, fostering a culture of knowledge transfer and engineering excellence.
You may be a good fit if you have:
Deep expertise in ML/HPC infrastructure: Experience with GPU/TPU clusters, distributed training frameworks (JAX, PyTorch, TensorFlow), and high-performance computing (HPC) environments.
Kubernetes at scale: Proven ability to deploy, manage, and troubleshoot cloud-native Kubernetes clusters for AI workloads.
Strong programming skills: Proficiency in Python (for ML tooling) and Go (for systems engineering), with a preference for open-source contributions over reinventing solutions.
Low-level systems knowledge: Familiarity with Linux internals, RDMA networking, and performance optimization for ML workloads.
Research collaboration experience: A track record of working closely with AI researchers or ML engineers to solve infrastructure challenges.
Self-directed problem-solving: The ability to identify bottlenecks, propose solutions, and drive impact in a fast-paced environment.
If some of the above doesn’t line up perfectly with your experience, we still encourage you to apply!
We value and celebrate diversity and strive to create an inclusive work environment for all. We welcome applicants from all backgrounds and are committed to providing equal opportunities. Should you require any accommodations during the recruitment process, please submit an Accommodations Request Form, and we will work together to meet your needs.
Full-Time Employees at Cohere enjoy these Perks:
🤝 An open and inclusive culture and work environment
🧑💻 Work closely with a team on the cutting edge of AI research
🍽 Weekly lunch stipend, in-office lunches & snacks
🦷 Full health and dental benefits, including a separate budget to take care of your mental health
🐣 100% Parental Leave top-up for up to 6 months
🎨 Personal enrichment benefits towards arts and culture, fitness and well-being, quality time, and workspace improvement
🏙 Remote-flexible, offices in Toronto, New York, San Francisco, London and Paris, as well as a co-working stipend
✈️ 6 weeks of vacation (30 working days!)
