Cohere is hiring a Senior Staff Data Engineer in Montreal!
Cohere, an enterprise AI company building foundation models and end-to-end products, is hiring a Senior Staff Data Engineer to head the Data Foundation pillar within its Analytics and Data Insights team, based in Montreal. The position is a people-leading, platform-owning role: the successful candidate takes charge of the warehouse that every analytics surface depends on, the pipelines feeding it, the access model protecting it, and an emerging agentic analytics layer that lets employees and their AI agents query governed data directly. Cohere describes the role as highly visible, with a roadmap already set around scaling the warehouse framework company-wide, launching an internal analytics agent backed by a real evaluation harness, and consolidating institutional knowledge into a self-maintaining system. The team works in BigQuery, dbt, Airflow, Cloud Run, Looker and Terraform, and governance is treated as a design concern rather than an afterthought.
Key responsibilities
- Hire, develop and lead a team of data and infrastructure engineers, setting the technical bar and building leadership depth below the role
- Own and sequence the Data Foundation roadmap, making trade-offs across warehouse buildout, agentic analytics, governance and platform work
- Run the data platform end to end: ingestion and connectors, Airflow and Cloud Run orchestration, BigQuery modeling in raw/core/mart layers with dbt, and serving via Looker, export APIs and semantic layers, all provisioned in Terraform
- Define data governance covering human, service-account and agent access, including VPC service controls, IAM patterns, onboarding documentation, audit logs and time-bound sensitive requests
- Operate for reliability through alerting and anomaly detection, data freshness SLAs, incident response and postmortems that produce durable standards
- Lead the agentic analytics program by connecting the semantic layer to an internal agent and building an evaluation harness to judge where AI belongs in production
- Set company-wide analytics standards for medallion architecture, naming and testing, and onboard new domains onto them
- Partner with product and engineering on customer-facing analytics surfaces, with Business Insights on marts, and with Security and Legal on governance and compliance requests
Key requirements
- 10+ years across data engineering, data infrastructure or analytics platforms, with a strong record managing data platform or infrastructure teams
- Hands-on prior depth in data engineering or infrastructure, sufficient to critically review Terraform plans, dbt DAGs and Airflow scheduler logs
- Production experience with cloud warehouses such as BigQuery or Snowflake, workflow orchestration like Airflow, and infrastructure as code such as Terraform
- Fluency in dimensional modeling, raw/core/mart separation and semantic layers, with clear views on where tests and contracts belong
- Demonstrated ability to set a roadmap from company strategy and deliver cross-team outcomes with the partnerships to support them
- Operational excellence evidenced by trusted alerting, met SLAs and well-documented incident follow-through
- Exposure to data security and governance: IAM, access management, VPC service controls and audit or compliance workflows
- Genuine enthusiasm for AI and comfort leading a multi-workstream roadmap in ambiguity while working directly with executives
- Seniority: Senior Staff / people-leading leadership role
- Work mode: Remote-friendly with offices including Montreal
- Key skills: BigQuery, dbt, Airflow, Cloud Run, Terraform, Looker, data modeling, data governance, IAM, VPC service controls, semantic layers, team leadership, incident response, AI evaluation
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