Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Audio Inference Engineer role sits at a core SaaS inflection point: turning frontier audio models into dependable, cost-aware, real-time services. Within the AI SaaS ecosystem, differentiation increasingly comes from serving quality at scale, where latency, throughput, and reliability shape product viability as much as model capability. The focus on streaming audio inference highlights a production setting where user experience is tightly coupled to systems performance.
From a SaaS career perspective, the work maps to durable problems that recur across AI-native platforms: identifying bottlenecks, tightening model serving loops, and aligning research outputs with deployable infrastructure. Collaboration across training and serving teams builds fluency in end-to-end ML delivery, an advantage for engineers aiming to operate at the interface of applied research and customer-facing systems. Experience with GPU optimization and distributed inference frameworks also translates well across modern SaaS stacks that monetize model access via APIs.
This position fits engineers who prefer measurable system outcomes and enjoy deep technical ownership across performance, integration, and runtime behavior. It will particularly suit those who want to specialize in inference efficiency and real-time workloads while staying close to product constraints typical of enterprise AI deployments. Remote-friendly structure also signals comfort with cross-time-zone collaboration and written technical coordination.
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?
Our team is a fast-growing group of committed researchers and engineers. The mission of the team is to build reliable machine learning systems and optimize audio inference serving efficiency using innovative techniques. As an engineer on this team, you will work on advancing core audio model serving metrics, including latency, throughput, and quality by diving deep into our systems, identifying bottlenecks, and delivering creative solutions for audio processing and streaming workloads.
You’ll collaborate closely with both the training and serving infrastructure teams to ensure seamless integration between model development and deployment, with a special focus on real-time and streaming audio inference.
Please Note: We have offices in Toronto, Montreal, San Francisco, New York, Paris, Seoul and London. We embrace a remote-friendly environment, and as part of this approach, we strategically distribute teams based on interests, expertise, and time zones to promote collaboration and flexibility. You'll find the Model Efficiency team concentrated in the EST and PST time zones, these are our preferred locations.
You may be a good fit for the team if you have:
Significant experience developing high-performance audio or machine learning inference systems.
Proficiency with programming languages such as C++ and Python.
Hands-on experience with deep learning models for audio, speech, or language applications.
A bias for action and a strong results-oriented mindset.
It is a big plus if you also have considerable experience with:
GPU programming, low-level system optimization, model parallelization techniques over multiple GPUs
Have experience with duplex real-time streaming architectures.
Internals of machine learning frameworks for audio (such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, or specialized audio libraries).
Have experience with inference framework like vLLM, SGLang, Tensort-LLM, or custom distributed inference systems
Sequence modeling (e.g., transformers for audio/speech) and end-to-end audio pipeline optimization
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!)
