Cohere is hiring a Senior Staff Data Engineer in Toronto!
Cohere is hiring a Senior Staff Data Engineer to lead the Data Foundation pillar within its Analytics and Data Insights team, based in Toronto with remote-friendly working options. This is a people-and-platform leadership role: you will head the team responsible for making company data trustworthy, governed, and accessible, from warehouse ingestion and modeling to secure access and an internal agentic analytics layer. The team owns BigQuery ingestion, Airflow and Cloud Run orchestration, dbt modeling across raw/core/mart layers, Looker and export-API serving, and Terraform-provisioned infrastructure. Governance is built into the design through VPC service controls, IAM patterns, audit logs, and documented access paths. The role combines hiring and developing engineers, setting a multi-workstream roadmap from company strategy, running reliable operations, and pushing an eval-driven approach to AI-assisted analytics. You will partner with product, engineering, business insights, security, and legal teams. Cohere describes itself as a security-first enterprise AI company with global offices and a remote-friendly culture. No salary figure is stated in the listing, and the posting encourages applicants even if they do not meet every qualification.
Key responsibilities
- Hire, lead, and develop a team of data and infrastructure engineers, setting technical standards and building leadership depth.
- Own and sequence the Data Foundation roadmap across warehouse buildout, agentic analytics, governance, and platform work.
- Run the data platform end to end: ingestion, Airflow and Cloud Run orchestration, BigQuery and dbt modeling, and serving through Looker, export APIs, and semantic layers, all provisioned as code with Terraform.
- Define governance and access for humans, service accounts, and agents using IAM, VPC service controls, audit logs, and documented onboarding paths; handle sensitive requests to deadline.
- Operate for reliability: maintain alerting and anomaly detection, meet freshness SLAs, lead incident response and postmortems, and convert incidents into durable standards.
- Lead the agentic analytics program by wiring the semantic layer into an internal analytics agent and building an eval harness to measure accuracy.
- Set company-wide analytics conventions, including medallion architecture, naming, testing, and documentation.
- Partner with product, engineering, business insights, security, and legal teams on analytics surfaces, marts, governance, and compliance-critical data work.
Key requirements
- 10+ years in data engineering, data infrastructure, or analytics platforms, with a strong management record leading data platform or infrastructure teams.
- Hands-on data engineering or infrastructure experience before management, including the ability to review Terraform plans, dbt DAGs, and Airflow scheduler logs.
- Production experience with cloud warehouses such as BigQuery or Snowflake, workflow orchestration such as Airflow, and infrastructure as code such as Terraform.
- Strong data modeling depth across fact and dimension tables, raw/core/mart separation, semantic layers, and testing or contract placement.
- A record of setting roadmaps from company strategy and delivering cross-team outcomes with strong cross-functional partnerships.
- Operational excellence: trusted alerting, met SLAs, incident leadership, and written postmortems that prevent recurrence.
- Exposure to data security and governance, including IAM, access management, VPC service controls or equivalent, and audit or compliance workflows.
- Genuine interest in AI and comfort with ambiguity, multi-workstream roadmaps, and executive-level prioritization.
- Seniority: Senior Staff / people-leading data platform role
- Work mode: Remote-friendly; Toronto office available
- Key skills: BigQuery, dbt, Airflow, Cloud Run, Terraform, Looker, data modeling, data governance, IAM, VPC service controls, team leadership, agentic analytics
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