Senior Software Engineer, Search

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?

We're looking for an experienced software engineer to join our Search team. You'll help build and optimize a next-generation search platform that uses both classical information retrieval (BM25) and modern AI tools to provide lexical and semantic search at scale. This platform is used inside Cohere and by external customers, so you’ll get to collaborate with multiple teams — enabling both internal and external success stories.

This role requires a strong foundation in distributed systems, search technologies, and cloud-native deployments.

As a Software Engineer on the Search team, you will:

• Integrate state-of-the-art models into retrieval products in collaboration with Machine Learning Engineers and Research Scientists.
• Design and maintain document ingestion pipelines for many types of data — and some guaranteed surprises when shovelling it into the system.
• Extend Kubernetes manifests, Helm charts, and Terraform configs for scalable, cloud-native deployments.
• Experiment with different indexing and nearest neighbor search strategies in OpenSearch (we hope you like vectors).

You may be a good fit if:

• You have strong Python skills and actual experience building or maintaining API services.
• You've built search or recommendation systems using classical IR techniques and/or modern ML-based methods.
• You're comfortable working with distributed systems and cloud deployments and can adapt to DevOps quirks and maintain dev environments.
• You have experience optimizing performance and resource usage in high-throughput or high-volume systems.
• You genuinely like talking to other humans—internal stakeholders, external customers—and solving their search problems.

If some of the above doesn’t line up perfectly with your experience, we still encourage you to apply! If you want to work really hard on a glorious mission with teammates that want the same thing, Cohere is the place for you.

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 6 months for employees based in Canada, the US, and the UK
• 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 and London and co-working stipend
• 6 weeks of vacation

Note: This post is co-authored by both Cohere humans and Cohere technology.