Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Staff Software Engineer role sits at a key junction in today’s SaaS landscape: delivering AI capabilities as a reliable, consumable platform via APIs. Inference infrastructure is increasingly the “product surface” for AI-first SaaS, where latency, throughput, and availability directly shape customer experience and adoption. The listing signals work on production model serving rather than experimentation, which is where many SaaS companies differentiate as they operationalise frontier models for enterprise use.
From a SaaS career perspective, this kind of platform engineering builds durable leverage. Experience designing and operating distributed systems for multi-tenant workloads, capacity planning, and reliability practices translates across B2B SaaS categories, especially as more products embed AI features. The cross-functional nature of model serving also tends to sharpen skills in incident response, performance engineering, and pragmatic trade-offs between cost and service levels.
This is best suited to engineers who prefer ownership of production-critical systems and enjoy deep troubleshooting across compute, networking, and orchestration layers. It will fit professionals who like working close to how customers consume a platform, including tailored deployments, and who want their infrastructure decisions to have clear product and business impact in a SaaS setting.
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 role?
Are you energized by building high-performance, scalable and reliable machine learning systems? Do you want to help define and build the next generation of AI platforms powering advanced NLP applications? We are looking for Members of Technical Staff to join the Model Serving team at Cohere. The team is responsible for developing, deploying, and operating the AI platform delivering Cohere's large language models through easy to use API endpoints. In this role, you will work closely with many teams to deploy optimized NLP models to production in low latency, high throughput, and high availability environments. You will also get the opportunity to interface with customers and create customized deployments to meet their specific needs.
You may be a good fit if you have:
5+ years of engineering experience running production infrastructure at a large scale
Experience designing large, highly available distributed systems with Kubernetes, and GPU workloads on those clusters
Experience with Kubernetes dev and production coding and support
Experience with GCP, Azure, AWS, OCI, multi-cloud on-prem / hybrid serving
Experience in designing, deploying, supporting, and troubleshooting in complex Linux-based computing environments
Experience in compute/storage/network resource and cost management
Excellent collaboration and troubleshooting skills to build mission-critical systems, and ensure smooth operations and efficient teamwork
The grit and adaptability to solve complex technical challenges that evolve day to day
Familiarity with computational characteristics of accelerators (GPUs, TPUs, and/or custom accelerators), especially how they influence latency and throughput of inference.
Strong understanding or working experience with distributed systems.
Experience in Golang, C++ or other languages designed for high-performance scalable servers).
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!)
