Senior/Staff Software Engineer (Back-End), Inference
WHY THIS ROLE?
This role is for a highly experienced Back-End Software Engineer who wants to work on core systems that shape how the platform (Model Vault) operates. You will help define the architecture of the platform where reliability, security, performance, and simplicity all matter, and where many of the problems do not have off-the-shelf solutions.
Model Vault is Cohere’s inference platform for deploying and operating models securely at enterprise scale. The team owns the systems between a customer and the underlying AI infrastructure, including identity, deployments, metering, billing, security, privacy, and confidential computing. We are strengthening these systems as Model Vault grows, with the goal of scaling to millions of users and supporting some of the world’s most demanding enterprise workloads.
AS A SENIOR/STAFF SOFTWARE ENGINEER, YOU WILL:
- Evolve and scale the backend systems that power Model Vault, including authentication and authorization, deployment management, billing, metering, and customer lifecycle.
- Lead major architectural initiatives across identity, payments, usage systems, platform scalability, and other core product foundations.
- Build highly 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 around correctness, consistency, isolation, failure recovery, idempotency, and observability.
- Build security and privacy into the platform architecture, including tenant isolation, least-privilege access, auditability, secrets management, encryption, and confidential computing boundaries.
- Solve complex problems that span backend systems, cloud infrastructure, security, and AI inference, where conventional SaaS patterns are often not enough.
- Drive projects end-to-end, from architecture and threat modeling through implementation, rollout, production operations, and iteration based on real customer workloads.
YOU MAY BE A GOOD FIT IF:
- You are a strong backend engineer with excellent fundamentals in distributed systems, databases, networking, operating systems, and security.
- You have strong programming fundamentals and experience building production systems in languages such as Go, Python, Java, C++, Rust, or similar. You write clean, maintainable, well-tested code and make thoughtful tradeoffs between simplicity, performance, and correctness.
- You have designed and operated production systems where correctness, availability, security, and performance mattered at significant scale.
- You can take ambiguous, high-impact technical problems, define the right architecture, and drive them through to reliable production systems.
- You have strong systems-design instincts and understand concepts such as concurrency, consistency, caching, queues, rate limiting, backpressure, failure domains, idempotency, and graceful degradation.
- You think deeply about security boundaries and understand authentication, authorization, identity, cryptography, secrets, tenant isolation, and how small implementation choices can create significant security risks.
- You are comfortable reasoning across backend services, APIs, databases, distributed systems, and the cloud infrastructure they run on.
- You are comfortable diving into unfamiliar codebases and debugging complex problems that cross service or system boundaries.
- You care about the details of production engineering, including instrumentation, capacity planning, migrations, backwards compatibility, incident response, and safe rollouts.
- You are comfortable challenging existing architecture and evolving foundational components when the system’s needs change.
- You have a track record of taking technically difficult projects from an unclear starting point to systems that other engineers and customers depend on.