Head of Data Platform & AI Foundations

Cohere; United States; Hybrid; USD 250,000 - 350,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health and dental benefits

Parental leave top‑up

Annual enrichment benefits

Remote‑friendly with office network

Job summary

Cohere is seeking a Head of the Data Foundation pillar to build and lead a global data platform team. You will own the end‑to‑end data platform—from ingestion and orchestration to warehouse modeling and semantic layers—empowering product and security teams with governance, reliability, and scalable analytics.

You will set the team roadmap from company strategy, define data access controls, and drive an analytics program that integrates AI-driven capabilities into production.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience across data engineering, data infrastructure, or analytics platform work; strong management experience.
• Hands‑on history in data engineering or infrastructure; able to read Terraform, dbt DAGs, or Airflow logs.
• Production experience with cloud data warehouses (BigQuery, Snowflake) and orchestration (Airflow); IaC mindset.
• Depth in data modeling and semantic layers; opinions on tests and contracts.
• Proven track record setting a team's roadmap from strategy and delivering cross‑team outcomes.
• Operational excellence with alerts, SLAs, incident handling, and postmortems.
• Exposure to data security and governance: IAM, VPC controls, audits.
• Genuine excitement about AI and building a data foundation for AI agents.

Responsibilities

• Build and lead the Data Foundation team; hire and grow engineers; raise team performance.
• Own and sequence the Data Foundation roadmap: warehouse buildout, analytics program, governance, platform work.
• Oversee data platform end‑to‑end: ingestion, orchestration, warehouse modeling, and serving via Looker and APIs.
• Define access controls and governance; manage audit logs and sensitive requests with deadlines.
• Operate for reliability: alerting, data freshness SLAs, incident response, postmortems.
• Lead the analytics program; wire semantic layer into internal analytics agents; measure accuracy.
• Set analytics standards and docs; onboard new domains and ensure consistency across systems.
• Partner across orgs: collaborate with product, Business Insights, Security, and Legal.

Skills

Data engineering

Data infrastructure

Leadership

Management experience

AI enthusiasm

Tools

BigQuery

Snowflake

Airflow

Terraform

dbt

Looker

Job description

Cohere is seeking a Head of the Data Foundation pillar to build and lead a global data platform team. You will own the end‑to‑end data platform—from ingestion and orchestration to warehouse modeling and semantic layers—empowering product and security teams with governance, reliability, and scalable analytics.

You will set the team roadmap from company strategy, define data access controls, and drive an analytics program that integrates AI-driven capabilities into production.