Senior Search Applications Performance Engineer

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.

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. We like to work hard and move fast to do what’s best for our customers.

Cohere is a team of researchers, engineers, designers, and more, who are passionate about their craft. Each person is one of the best in the world at what they do. We believe that a diverse range of perspectives is a requirement for building great products.

Join us on our mission and shape the future!

Join the Compass team to optimize and scale our Search Applications and infrastructure, ensuring users receive fast, reliable, and intelligent search experiences. You'll work at the intersection of search technology and performance engineering, revolutionizing how users interact with AI-powered search through continuous optimization, benchmarking, and infrastructure enhancements. Your work will directly enhance document understanding capabilities and support the development of new tool surfaces designed for agentic users.

• Implement performance monitoring and optimization strategies for Compass search services and the integration with North

• Develop and maintain benchmarking frameworks to evaluate search model performance and infrastructure efficiency

• Collaborate with modeling teams to optimize search models for faster response times and reduced resource consumption

• Work on scaling the search services while maintaining high availability and low latency

• Partner with product teams to translate performance requirements into technical implementations

• Develop and optimize new tool surfaces for agentic search experiences

• You have proficiency in Python and backend search technologies (OpenSearch, ElasticSearch, Weaviate, FastAPI)

• You possess experience with data or evaluation pipelines and performance benchmarking

• You have experience profiling applications hosted on a mix of CPU, GPU, and autoscaled compute nodes

• You can communicate technical performance metrics effectively to cross-functional teams

• You have 4+ years of experience contributing to production environments

• Experience with Kubernetes, Helm, and infrastructure deployment

• Familiarity with GPU-based model inference optimization (ONNX, Triton, vLLM)

• History working in the search and discovery domain

If some of the above doesn’t line up perfectly with your experience, we still encourage you to apply!

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.

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.

Full-Time Employees at Cohere enjoy these Perks:

🤝 An 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 & 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 6 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

✈️ 6 weeks of vacation (30 working days!)