Member of Technical Staff, Pre-Training Data

Cohere; Quebec; Remote; CAD 250,000 - 535,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Lunch stipend

Health and dental benefits

RRSP matching

Parental leave top-up

Education stipend

Six weeks paid vacation

Home office stipend

Job summary

Cohere, a leading security-first enterprise AI company, seeks a Machine Learning Engineer specializing in pretraining data to build and refine data pipelines for language models.

You will conduct data ablations, design data mixtures, and bridge research with engineering to improve training throughput and efficiency, with remote-friendly options and EST/EU time alignment.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering skills with Python.
• Experience building data pipelines and data processing.
• Familiar with curriculum learning and data mixing.
• Experience with large-scale multilingual datasets.
• Knowledge of data quality assessment and experimentation.

Responsibilities

• Develop data pipelines and pretraining data components.
• Conduct data ablations to evaluate data quality.
• Construct pretraining data mixtures to improve models.
• Collaborate with researchers and engineers to align pipelines with model training needs.

Skills

Python

Data pipelines

Data quality

Curriculum learning

Data mixing

Tools

Apache Spark

Apache Beam

Pandas

Job description

Who are we?

Cohere is the leading security-first enterprise AI company. We build cutting-edge foundation AI models and end-to-end products that are designed to solve real-world business problems.

We’re training and deploying frontier models for enterprises who are building AI systems. We believe that our work is instrumental to the widespread adoption of AI and we are looking for folks that want to be part of that.

We obsess over what we build. Each one of us is responsible for contributing to increasing the capabilities of our models and the value they drive for our customers. Cohere is a team of researchers, engineers, designers, and more, who are all passionate about their craft.

We are a global technology company headquartered in Toronto with key offices in London, New York City, San Francisco, Montreal, Paris, Berlin and Seoul. Join us!

Role Overview

As a Machine Learning Engineer specializing in pretraining data, you will play a pivotal role in developing the data pipeline that underpins Cohere’s advanced language models. In this role, you will conduct data ablations to evaluate data quality and construct pre-training data mixtures to enhance model performance. By combining research and engineering, you will bridge the gap between raw data and cutting-edge AI models, directly contributing to improvements in critical training metrics like throughput and accelerator utilization.

Your work will be essential to Cohere’s mission of delivering efficient and reliable language understanding and generation capabilities, driving innovation in natural language processing. If you are passionate about transforming data into the foundation of AI systems, this role offers a unique opportunity to make a meaningful impact.

Please Note: We have offices in London, Paris, Toronto, San Francisco and New York but also embrace being remote-friendly! There are no restrictions on where you can be located for this role between EST and EU.

Key Responsibilities

• Conduct data ablations to assess data quality and experiment with data mixtures to enhance model performance.
• Develop robust data modeling techniques to ensure datasets are structured and formatted for optimal training efficiency.
• Research and implement innovative data curation methods, leveraging Cohere’s infrastructure to drive advancements in natural language processing.
• Collaborate with cross‑functional teams, including researchers and engineers, to ensure data pipelines meet the demands of cutting‑edge language models.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering skills, with proficiency in Python and experience building data pipelines.
• Familiarity with curriculum learning, data mixing and data attribution.
• Familiarity with data processing frameworks such as Apache Spark, Apache Beam, Pandas, or similar tools.
• Experience working with large-scale datasets, including web data, code data, and multilingual corpora.
• Knowledge of data quality assessment techniques and experimentation with data mixtures.
• A passion for bridging research and engineering to solve complex data‑related challenges in AI model training.

Bonus: paper at top-tier venues (such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AIStats, MLSys, JMLR, AAAI, Nature, COLING, ACL, EMNLP).

Working Location:

This role can be based remotely or from one of our office locations listed on the job description - there is no minimum in-office qualification requirement. We care most about hiring exceptional people regardless of locations, though please check the location listed on the posting for guidance around the core time zone or working hours alignment expected for the role.

Full-Time Employees At Cohere Enjoy These Perks

• A weekly lunch stipend of $75/£75 or equivalent in your local currency for lunch.
• Full health and dental benefits, including a separate budget for mental health.
• RRSP matching, 401K, Pension Scheme.
• 100% Parental Leave top-up for up to 6 months, for either parent.
• Annual enrichment benefits:
• Arts & culture, fitness/wellness, quality time, and a workspace improvement credit.
• Education & learning stipend for conferences, courses, and coaching.
• 6 weeks of paid vacation (30 working days!)
• Budget for traveling to other offices if you are remote, plus an annual company offsite.

How And Where We Work

• Cohere is remote-friendly, but we also have offices in Toronto, London, New York City, San Francisco, Montreal, Paris, Berlin and Seoul with more opening soon.
• For those in the office: a daily lunch program, plenty of snacks, and regular community and social events.
• For those not near an office: a co-working benefit so you can work alongside others in your city.
• Everyone receives a $500 home office stipend to set up your workspace properly.

If any of the above doesn’t line up exactly with your experience, we still encourage you to apply.

We strive to create an inclusive work environment for all; we welcome applicants from all backgrounds and are committed to providing equal opportunities. Should you require any accommodations during the recruitment process, please submit an Accommodations Request Form, and we will work together to meet your needs.

We may use AI-enabled tools to screen and assess applicants against the criteria for this position. This helps our recruiters identify potentially qualified candidates, but it doesn't limit the applications our recruiters may review or consider.

Compensation Range: CA$250K - CA$535K