Member of Technical Staff, Senior/Staff MLE

Why This Role Is Different

This is not a typical “Applied Scientist” or “ML Engineer” role. As a Member of Technical Staff, Applied ML, you will:

• Work directly with enterprise customers on problems that push LLMs to their limits. You’ll rapidly understand customer domains, design custom LLM solutions, and deliver production-ready models that solve high-value, real-world problems.
• Train and customize frontier models — not just use APIs. You’ll leverage Cohere’s full stack: CPT, post-training, retrieval + agent integrations, model evaluations, and SOTA modeling techniques.
• Influence the capabilities of Cohere’s foundation models. Techniques, datasets, evaluations, and insights you develop for customers will directly shape the next generation of Cohere’s frontier models.
• Operate with an early-startup level of ownership inside a frontier-model company. This role combines the breadth of an early-stage CTO with the infrastructure and scale of a deep-learning lab.
• Wear multiple hats, set a high technical bar, and define what Applied ML at Cohere becomes. Few roles in the industry combine application, research, customer-facing engineering, and core-model influence as directly as this one.

What You’ll Do

Technical Leadership & Solution Design

• Lead the design and delivery of custom LLM solutions for enterprise customers.
• Translate ambiguous business problems into well-framed ML problems with clear success criteria and evaluation methodologies.

Modeling, Customization & Foundations Contribution

• Build custom models using Cohere’s foundation model stack, CPT recipes, post-training pipelines (including RLVR), and data assets.
• Develop SOTA modeling techniques that directly enhance model performance for customer use-cases.
• Contribute improvements back to the foundation-model stack — including new capabilities, tuning strategies, and evaluation frameworks.

Customer-Facing Technical Impact

• Work closely with enterprise customers to identify high-value opportunities where LLMs can unlock transformative impact.
• Provide technical leadership across discovery, scoping, modeling, deployment, agent workflows, and post-deployment iteration.
• Establish evaluation frameworks and success metrics for custom modeling engagements.

Team Mentorship & Organizational Impact

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

You May Be a Good Fit If You Have

Technical Foundations

• Strong ML fundamentals and the ability to frame complex, ambiguous problems as ML solutions.
• Fluency with Python and core ML/LLM frameworks.
• Experience working with large-scale datasets and distributed training or inference pipelines.
• Understanding of LLM architectures, tuning techniques (CPT, post-training), and evaluation methodologies.
• Demonstrated ability to meaningfully shape LLM performance.

Experience & Leadership

• Experience engaging directly with customers or stakeholders to design and deliver ML-powered solutions.
• A track record of technical leadership at a team level.
• A broad view of the ML research landscape and a desire to push the state of the art.

Mindset

• Bias toward action, high ownership, and comfort with ambiguity.
• Humility and strong collaboration instincts.
• A deep conviction that AI should meaningfully empower people and organizations.

Join Us

This is a pivotal moment in Cohere’s history. As an MTS in Applied ML, you will define not only what we build — but how the world experiences AI. If you're excited about building custom models, solving generational problems for global organizations, and shaping frontier-model capabilities, we’d love to meet you.

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. We have offices in Toronto, San Francisco, New York City, London, Paris, Montreal, and more coming 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.