Member of Technical Staff, Training Performance Engineer

Cohere; United States; Remote; USD 175,000 - 325,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Weekly lunch stipend

Health and dental benefits

RRSP matching / 401K / Pension

Parental leave up to 6 months

Enrichment benefits + learning stipend

6 weeks paid vacation

Travel budget to other offices

Home office stipend $500

Job summary

Cohere is seeking a Performance Engineer for the Pre-Training team to optimize training performance of its language models. You will focus on throughput, accelerator utilization, and cutting-edge tooling in a globally distributed setting.

The role blends software engineering with ML kernel design, requiring expertise in GPUs, Triton/CUDA and distributed training. Remote-friendly with time-zone alignment across ET to CET.

Qualifications

• Extremely strong software engineering skills.
• Proficiency in Python and ML frameworks such as JAX, PyTorch and XLA/MLIR.
• Experience writing kernels for GPUs using CUDA, Triton, etc.
• Experience using large-scale distributed training strategies.
• Familiarity with autoregressive sequence models, such as Transformers.

Responsibilities

• Design and write high-performant and scalable software for training.
• Understand architectural modifications and their effects on throughput and quality.
• Write low-level CUDA, Triton kernels to maximize accelerator performance.
• Research, implement, and experiment with ideas on supercompute and data infrastructure.
• Collaborate with researchers to advance state-of-the-art language models.

Skills

Python

ML frameworks (JAX, PyTorch, XLA/MLIR)

CUDA kernels

Triton

Distributed training

Transformers

Kernel design

Tools

CUDA

Job description

Who are we?

Cohere is the leading security-first enterprise AI company. We build cutting-edge foundation AI models and end-to-end products that are designed to solve real-world business problems.

We’re training and deploying frontier models for enterprises who are building AI systems. We believe that our work is instrumental to the widespread adoption of AI and we are looking for folks that want to be part of that.

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. Cohere is a team of researchers, engineers, designers, and more, who are all passionate about their craft.

We are a global technology company headquartered in Toronto with key offices in London, New York City, San Francisco, Montreal, Paris, Berlin and Seoul. Join us!

Role Overview:

As a Performance Engineer in the Pre-Training team you will be responsible for optimizing the performance of our advanced language models and systems. Their primary focus is on improving key model training metrics, such as training throughput, ensuring high accelerator utilization.

The team combines expertise in software engineering, machine learning, and low-level kernel design and development to design robust systems and enhance model performance. You will work on identifying and removing performance bottlenecks, develop cutting-edge training and profiling tools to help Cohere's mission of providing efficient and reliable language understanding and generation capabilities and drive innovation in the field of natural language processing.

Note: We have offices in London, Toronto, New York and San Francisco, but we’re also remote-friendly! This team operates primarily between ET to CET time zones, so we’re seeking candidates in locations that align with these hours for effective collaboration.

Key Responsibilities:

• Design and write high-performant and scalable software for training.

• Understand architectural modifications and design choices and their effects on training throughput and quality.

• Write low-level CUDA, triton kernels to squeeze every last bit of performance from our accelerators.

• Research, implement, and experiment with ideas on our supercompute and data infrastructure.

• Learn from and work with the best researchers in the field.

Qualifications:

• Extremely strong software engineering skills.

• Proficiency in Python and related ML frameworks such as JAX, Pytorch and XLA/MLIR.

• Experience writing kernels for GPUs using CUDA, triton, etc

• Experience using large-scale distributed training strategies.

• Familiarity with autoregressive sequence models, such as Transformers.

Bonus: paper at top-tier venues (such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AIStats, MLSys, JMLR, AAAI, Nature, COLING, ACL, EMNLP).

Working location:

This role can be based remotely or from one of our office locations listed on the job description - there is no minimum in-office qualification requirement. We care most about hiring exceptional people regardless of locations, though please check the location listed on the posting for guidance around the core time zone or working hours alignment expected for the role.

Full-Time Employees at Cohere enjoy these Perks:

• A weekly lunch stipend of $75/£75 or equivalent in your local currency for lunch.

• Full health and dental benefits, including a separate budget for mental health.

• RRSP matching, 401K, Pension Scheme.

• 100% Parental Leave top-up for up to 6 months, for either parent.

• Annual enrichment benefits:

  Arts & culture, fitness/wellness, quality time, and a workspace improvement credit.

  Education & learning stipend for conferences, courses, and coaching.

• 6 weeks of paid vacation (30 working days!)

• Budget for traveling to other offices if you are remote, plus an annual company offsite.

How and Where We Work:

• Cohere is remote-friendly, but we also have offices in Toronto, London, New York City, San Francisco, Montreal, Paris, Berlin and Seoul with more opening soon.

• For those in the office: a daily lunch program, plenty of snacks, and regular community and social events.

• For those not near an office: a co-working benefit so you can work alongside others in your city.

• Everyone receives a $500 home office stipend to set up your workspace properly.

We 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.

We may use AI-enabled tools to screen and assess applicants against the criteria for this position. This helps our recruiters identify potentially qualified candidates, but it doesn't limit the applications our recruiters may review or consider.

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