Head of Data Foundation & Platform Engineering

Cohere; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 275,000 - 450,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Lunch stipend

Health benefits

Parental leave

Education stipend

Vacation days

Company offsite

Home office stipend

Job summary

Cohere is seeking a head of the Data Foundation pillar within the Analytics and Data Insights team. You’ll lead data and infrastructure engineers, own ingestion into BigQuery, orchestration with Airflow and Cloud Run, and model the warehouse with dbt.

Everything is provisioned as code in Terraform, with governance built in. You’ll partner with product, security, and legal to ensure data trust, availability, and compliance, scale the framework across the company, and drive an ambitious analytics

Qualifications

• 10+ years in data engineering, data infrastructure, or analytics platform work with management experience.
• Hands-on history in data engineering or infrastructure before management.
• Production experience with cloud data warehouses (BigQuery/Snowflake) and workflow orchestration (Airflow) and IaC (Terraform).
• Deep data modeling with raw/core/mart layers and semantic layers; experience leading multi‑team roadmaps.
• Comfort operating in ambiguity and coordinating across executives and multiple stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Build and lead the data and infrastructure engineering team.
• Set and execute the Data Foundation roadmap: warehouse, governance, and platform.
• Own end-to-end data platform: ingestion, orchestration, modeling, serving.
• Define access governance with IAM, VPC controls, and compliant data handling.
• Ensure reliability with SLAs, incident response, and postmortems.
• Lead the agentic analytics program and internal analytics agent.
• Set analytics standards and onboard new domains onto standards.
• Collaborate with product, security, and legal on data surfaces and governance.

Skills

Data leadership

Cloud data warehouses

Infrastructure as code

Governance

Tools

BigQuery

Airflow

dbt

Terraform

Looker

Job description

Cohere is seeking a head of the Data Foundation pillar within the Analytics and Data Insights team. You’ll lead data and infrastructure engineers, own ingestion into BigQuery, orchestration with Airflow and Cloud Run, and model the warehouse with dbt.

Everything is provisioned as code in Terraform, with governance built in. You’ll partner with product, security, and legal to ensure data trust, availability, and compliance, scale the framework across the company, and drive an ambitious analytics