Cohere is hiring a Senior Staff Data Engineer in Ottawa!
Cohere is hiring a senior data platform leader for its Ottawa location to head the Data Foundation pillar within the Analytics and Data Insights team. This is a senior staff-level role that blends people leadership, roadmap ownership, and hands-on technical judgment. The successful candidate will lead a team responsible for making company data trustworthy, governed, and readily available: BigQuery warehouse buildout, ingestion pipelines, Airflow and Cloud Run orchestration, dbt modeling, Terraform-provisioned infrastructure, and serving through Looker, export APIs, and semantic layers. The role also owns data governance and reliability, including access patterns for humans and agents, VPC service controls, IAM, auditability, freshness SLAs, alerting, and incident response. A major program is agentic analytics: connecting the semantic layer to an internal analytics agent, building an evaluation harness, and deciding where AI is reliable enough for production. The position requires setting standards across analytics, partnering with product, engineering, business insights, security, and legal teams, and growing a high-performing team beneath you. Cohere describes itself as remote-friendly with offices, and the listing does not state a salary figure.
Key responsibilities
- Lead and grow a team of data and infrastructure engineers, setting technical expectations and developing future leaders.
- Own and sequence the Data Foundation roadmap across warehouse buildout, agentic analytics, governance, and platform work.
- Run the end-to-end data platform: ingestion, Airflow and Cloud Run orchestration, BigQuery modeling with dbt, and serving through Looker, APIs, and semantic layers.
- Define and maintain data governance through IAM patterns, VPC service controls, access documentation, audit logs, and sensitive-data workflows.
- Operate for reliability by maintaining alerting and anomaly detection, owning freshness SLAs, leading incident response, and turning incidents into durable standards.
- Direct the agentic analytics program, including semantic-layer integration, evaluation harness design, and evidence-based production decisions.
- Establish analytics conventions for modeling, naming, testing, and documentation, then onboard other domains onto them.
- Partner with product, engineering, business insights, security, and legal stakeholders on analytics surfaces, governance, and compliance-critical requests.
Key requirements
- 10 or more years in data engineering, data infrastructure, or analytics platforms, including a strong record managing data platform or infrastructure teams.
- Hands-on technical depth before management, with the ability to review Terraform plans, dbt DAGs, and Airflow scheduler logs critically.
- 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 skills, including fact and dimension design, raw/core/mart separation, semantic layers, and testing or contract ownership.
- Experience setting a team roadmap from company strategy and delivering outcomes across multiple teams and functions.
- Demonstrated operational excellence through 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 equivalents, and audit or compliance workflows.
- Genuine interest in AI and comfort leading a multi-workstream roadmap in ambiguity while working directly with executives.
- Seniority: Senior Staff / Head of Data Foundation pillar
- Work mode: Remote-friendly with offices; Ottawa listed
- Key skills: BigQuery, dbt, Airflow, Cloud Run, Terraform, Looker, data modeling, data governance, IAM, VPC service controls, incident response, team leadership, agentic analytics, evaluation harness
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