Senior Member of Technical Staff, Safety and Security for Agents

Cohere; Montreal; Hybrid; CAD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Open and inclusive culture

Collaborative AI research environment

Weekly lunch stipend

Full health and dental benefits

100% Parental Leave top‑up

Personal enrichment benefits

Remote-flexible work options

6 weeks of vacation

Job summary

A leading AI research firm in Montreal seeks a Member of Technical Staff for its Safety for Agents team. This role focuses on enhancing the safety of Large Language Models by working on data generation and evaluation methods. Ideal candidates will have strong statistical and programming skills, as well as a passion for ethical AI development. Cohere offers a supportive work environment with excellent benefits, including a flexible work structure, health care, and generous leave policies.

Qualifications

• Strong statistical skills and experience evaluating scientific experiments.
• Extremely strong software engineering skills.
• Experience analyzing datasets with respect to their quality and biases.
• Hands-on experience training large language models on distributed infrastructures.
• Excellent communication skills to collaborate effectively.
• Experience analyzing datasets with respect to their quality, biases, and suitability for training ML models.
• Hands-on experience training large language models (LLMs) on distributed training infrastructures.
• Familiarity with evaluating and improving generalizability and robustness of ML systems.
• Proficiency in Python and ML frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX).
• Excellent communication skills to collaborate with cross-functional teams and present findings.
• One or more papers at top-tier venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AIStats, MLSys, JMLR, AAAI, Nature, COLING, ACL, EMNLP).

Responsibilities

• Focus on data generation, post-training algorithms, and evaluation methods.
• Work closely with cross-functional teams.
• Handle messy data and scientific problems.

Skills

Statistical skills

Software engineering

Data collection design

Dataset analysis

Training large language models

Evaluating ML system robustness

Programming with Python

Communication skills

Research publications

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

JAX

Job description

Who are we?

Our mission is to scale intelligence to serve humanity. We’re training and deploying frontier models for developers and enterprises who are building AI systems to power magical experiences like content generation, semantic search, RAG, and agents. We believe that our work is instrumental to the widespread adoption of AI.

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. We like to work hard and move fast to do what’s best for our customers.

Cohere is a team of researchers, engineers, designers, and more, who are passionate about their craft. Each person is one of the best in the world at what they do. We believe that a diverse range of perspectives is a requirement for building great products.

Join us on our mission and shape the future!

Why this role?

As a Member of Technical Staff in the Safety for Agents team, you will make a meaningful impact on the development of better, fairer, more trustworthy, and more secure Large Language Models (LLMs). Your primary focus will be on data generation, post‑training algorithms, and evaluation methods to ensure Safety in the next generation of models that can access external resources and take actions in the world. You will work closely with other cross‑functional machine learning teams and data annotation teams, and will also collaborate with product and policy teams.

This role combines expertise in machine learning, ethical and responsible AI, experimental design, and data generation and management.

It will require curiosity to tackle totally new scientific problems, engineering skills to implement the pieces we need to test solutions to these, and a desire to dive into messy data and results. You will be on a small team with a lot of autonomy and decision‑making power, responsible for making the next generation of LLMs better for society as a whole.

Please note: The existing team works in offices in London, Edinburgh, Paris, Toronto, and New York, but we also embrace being remote‑friendly! For this role you need to have ~50% working day overlap with UK/EU timezone (e.g. US East is fine) but there are otherwise no restrictions on where you can be located for this role.

You May Be a Good Fit If You Have

• Strong statistical skills and experience evaluating scientific experiments related to data collection and model performance.
• Extremely strong software engineering skills.
• Strong expertise in designing and conducting data collection tasks, including working with human annotators.
• Experience analyzing datasets with respect to their quality, biases, and suitability for training ML models.
• Hands‑on experience training large language models (LLMs) on distributed training infrastructures.
• Familiarity with evaluating and improving the generalizability and robustness of ML systems.
• Proficiency in programming languages such as Python and ML frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX).
• Excellent communication skills to collaborate effectively with cross‑functional teams and present findings.
• One or more papers at top‑tier venues (such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AIStats, MLSys, JMLR, AAAI, Nature, COLING, ACL, EMNLP).

If some of the above doesn’t line up perfectly with your experience, we still encourage you to apply!

We value and celebrate diversity and 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.

Full-Time Employees At Cohere Enjoy These Perks

• 🤝 An open and inclusive culture and work environment
• 🧑💻 Work closely with a team on the cutting edge of AI research
• 🍽 Weekly lunch stipend, in‑office lunches & snacks
• 🦷 Full health and dental benefits, including a separate budget to take care of your mental health
• 🐣 100% Parental Leave top‑up for up to 6 months
• 🎨 Personal enrichment benefits towards arts and culture, fitness and well‑being, quality time, and workspace improvement
• 🏙 Remote‑flexible, offices in Toronto, New York, San Francisco, London and Paris, as well as a co‑working stipend
• ✈️ 6 weeks of vacation (30 working days!)