Site Reliability Engineer, Inference Infrastructure

Cohere Cohere · AI Frontier · Toronto, ON · Inference

Cohere is seeking a Site Reliability Engineer to join their Model Serving team. This role focuses on building, deploying, and operating the AI platform that delivers Cohere's large language models through API endpoints. The engineer will work on high-performance, scalable, and reliable machine learning systems, ensuring low latency, high throughput, and high availability for NLP model deployments. Responsibilities include automating service management, environment observability, and resilience, while collaborating with internal developers and influencing the infrastructure roadmap.

What you'd actually do

  1. Build self-service systems that automate managing, deploying and operating services.
  2. This includes our custom Kubernetes operators that support language model deployments.
  3. Automate environment observability and resilience. Enable all developers to troubleshoot and resolve problems.
  4. Take steps required to ensure we hit defined SLOs, including participation in an on-call rotation.
  5. Build strong relationships with internal developers and influence the Infrastructure team’s roadmap based on their feedback.

Skills

Required

  • 5+ years of engineering experience running production infrastructure at a large scale
  • Experience designing large, highly available distributed systems with Kubernetes, and GPU workloads on those clusters
  • Experience with Kubernetes dev and production coding and support
  • Experience with GCP, Azure, AWS, OCI, multi-cloud on-prem / hybrid serving
  • Experience in designing, deploying, supporting, and troubleshooting in complex Linux-based computing environments
  • Experience in compute/storage/network resource and cost management
  • Familiarity with computational characteristics of accelerators (GPUs, TPUs, and/or custom accelerators), especially how they influence latency and throughput of inference.
  • Strong understanding or working experience with distributed systems.
  • Experience in Golang, C++ or other languages designed for high-performance scalable servers).

Nice to have

  • Excellent collaboration and troubleshooting skills to build mission-critical systems, and ensure smooth operations and efficient teamwork
  • The grit and adaptability to solve complex technical challenges that evolve day to day

What the JD emphasized

  • running production infrastructure at a large scale
  • highly available distributed systems
  • Kubernetes
  • GPU workloads
  • low latency
  • high throughput
  • high availability

Other signals

  • Deploying and operating AI platforms
  • LLM serving
  • High-throughput, low-latency inference