Forward Deployed Engineer, Agentic Platform (West Coast)

Cohere; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Open and inclusive culture

Weekly lunch stipend

Full health and dental benefits

100% parental leave top-up

Personal enrichment benefits

Six weeks of vacation

Job summary

Cohere is seeking a Software Engineer with Applied AI experience to design and deploy LLM-powered agents for enterprise customers. The role involves translating business problems into agentic workflows, leading the design and delivery of agents that exhibit enterprise-grade performance, and mentoring distributed teams. Applicants should have substantial experience in Python or TypeScript, knowledge of agent architectures and frontier models like GPT, and strong communication skills. The position offers a flexible remote work model and numerous perks, including comprehensive health benefits and generous vacation time.

Qualifications

• Substantial experience building production-grade software (Python/TypeScript).
• Hands-on experience building agents that plan and execute multi-step tasks.
• Deep familiarity with frontier models (GPT, Claude, Gemini), RAG, and vector databases.
• Proven ability to build robust evaluation frameworks for measuring agent performance.

Responsibilities

• Translate high-value, ambiguous business problems into clear agentic problems.
• Lead design and delivery of LLM-powered agents with high reliability.
• Mentor engineers across distributed teams and drive alignment.

Skills

Production Engineering

Agentic Architectures

The LLM Stack

Rigorous Evaluation

Stakeholder Mastery

Mentorship

Strong communication skills

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.

Why this role?

We’re a fast‑growing startup building production‑grade AI agents for enterprise customers at scale. We’re looking for Software Engineers with Applied AI experience who can own the design, build, and deployment of agentic workflows powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) — from early prototypes to production‑grade AI agents, to deliver concrete business value in enterprise workflows.

What You’ll Do

Customer‑Facing Technical Impact

• Work closely with enterprise customers to translate high‑value, ambiguous business problems into well‑framed agentic problems with clear success criteria and evaluation methodologies.
• Provide technical leadership across the full development and evaluation lifecycle, including post‑deployment iteration, for agentic workflows.
• Contribute to shared frameworks and patterns that enable consistent delivery across customers.

Agent Design, Build and Production Launches

• Lead the design, build, and delivery of LLM‑powered agents that reason, plan, and act across tools and data sources with enterprise‑grade reliability and performance.
• Balance rapid iteration with enterprise requirements, evolving prototypes into stable, reusable solutions.
• Define and apply evaluation and quality standards to measure success, failures, and regressions.
• Debug real‑world agent behavior and systematically improve prompts, workflows, tools, and guardrails.

Team Mentorship & Organizational Impact

• Mentor engineers across distributed teams.
• Drive clarity in ambiguous situations, build alignment, and raise engineering quality across the organization.

Required Skills & Experience

Technical Foundations & Applied AI

• Production Engineering: Substantial experience building, shipping, and maintaining production‑grade software (Python/TypeScript). You understand how to write clean, testable, observable, and scalable code.
• Agentic Architectures: Hands‑on experience building agents that plan and execute multi‑step tasks (ReAct, Plan‑and‑Execute) and interact with external APIs/tools.
• The LLM Stack: Deep familiarity with frontier models (GPT, Claude, Gemini), RAG, vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, etc.), and orchestration frameworks (LangGraph, CrewAI, or custom state machines).
• Rigorous Evaluation: Proven ability to move beyond “trial and error” by building robust evaluation frameworks to measure agent accuracy, safety, and latency.

Leadership & Impact

• Stakeholder Mastery: Experience leading technical discussions with enterprise customers to translate ambiguous business needs into concrete technical specifications.
• Experience mentoring distributed teams and setting the architectural standards for AI/Agentic systems.

Additional Requirements

• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Ability and interest to travel up to 25%, flexible.

Why Join Us

• Build production‑grade AI agents used in real enterprise workflows.
• Operate at scale while retaining end‑to‑end ownership.
• Work on hard problems in agent design, evaluation, and reliability.
• Shape shared platforms and standards, not just individual features.
• Move fast with a high bar for quality, safety, and reliability.

Perks

• 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 and 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 six 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.
• Six weeks of vacation (30 working days).

Equal Opportunity and Diversity

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.