Senior Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure

Key Skills

Analytical and Problem solving, Apache Airflow, Dagger2, Design, Effective communication skills, ETL frameworks, JAX framework, Large Language Models - LLMs, Machine learning techniques, MLOps tools, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Python Programming, SPARK Programming

Job Description

We’re a small, diverse team working at the cutting edge of machine learning. At Cohere, our mission is to build machines that understand the world and to make them safely accessible to all. Language is at the crux of this, but it can be difficult and expensive to parse the syntax, semantics, and context that all work together to give words meaning. The Cohere platform provides access to Large Language Models through its APIs that read billions of web pages and learns to understand the meaning, sentiment, and intent of the words we use in a richness never seen before. 

We've recently raised our Series C, and we are focused on bringing our technology to market. We will partner with customers so they can build natural language understanding and generation into their products with just a few lines of code.

We’re ambitious — we believe our technology will fundamentally transform how industries interact with natural language. And we have the technical chops to back it up - Cohere’s CEO, Aidan Gomez, is a co-author of the groundbreaking paper “Attention is all you need”, and was previously part of Google Brain. Our entire technical team is world-class. 

We are focused on creating a diverse and inclusive work environment so that all of our team members can thrive. We welcome kind and brilliant people to our team, from wherever they come.

Why this role?

At Cohere, we strive to continually improve our large language models. Academic research and real-world experience has demonstrated that high quality, diverse datasets can contribute as much to the performance and capabilities of LLMs as the underlying model architecture and training regimen. We at Cohere believe data will play a central role in accelerating the advancement of our already world-class language models.

Data is therefore critical to our success. Our ability to acquire data that is accurate, relevant, and timely is key to our ability to improve the quality of our models. We strive to continuously improve our data acquisition processes and systems to ensure that we have the data we need to stay competitive and meet the needs of our customers. We run frequent experiments to learn more about the role of data for model quality, from data mixtures, to cleaning techniques, to quality control.

This role will be part of the Data Acquisition team, which broadly provides data for training models and is responsible for building and maintaining the infrastructure that acquires, cleans, and formats data for model training. We are looking for a technically skilled, resourceful problem-solver who is able to work in areas of ambiguity and find efficient and sometimes creative solutions. The main responsibility of this role is to improve our internal data acquisition infrastructure, which includes data crawlers, formatters, and integrations with data providers. This role would also work closely with different teams at Cohere to support their data acquisition needs, as well as engage in more experimental work to develop highly informative data signals.

Please Note: We have offices in Toronto, Palo Alto, and London but embrace being remote-first! There are no restrictions on where you can be located for this role.

As a Senior Software Engineer specializing in Data Infrastructure, you will:

• Design, build, and maintain data infrastructure to support large-scale data pipelines
• Establish infrastructure to enable rigorous experimentation and evaluation
• Implement best practices for data management and governance
• Develop technical proposals and lead vendor selection processes
• Collaborate cross-functionally to ensure infrastructure alignment across the organization
• Mentor junior team members and contribute to their professional growth

You may be a good fit if:

• You have more than 5 years of experience working as a software engineer specializing in data infrastructure.
• You have proficiency in Python and have used distributed processing technologies like Spark, Dask, etc.
• You have experience working with job orchestrators (e.g. Airflow, Dagster, Prefect) and/or MLOps frameworks (e.g. Metaflow, Pachyderm, DVC).
• You have built data pipelines and ETL processes to support large-scale datasets
• You have experience working with unstructured and/or human-annotated data (e.g., collecting or assessing sample quality).
• You have worked with ML frameworks such as Tensorflow, TF-Serving, JAX, and XLA/MLIR
• You have strong communication and problem-solving skills, and prefer using the right tool for the job even if it’s outside your wheelhouse.
• You have a demonstrated passion for applied NLP models and products

If some of the above doesn’t line up perfectly with your experience, we still encourage you to apply! If you consider yourself a thoughtful worker, a lifelong learner, and a kind and playful team member, Cohere is the place for you.