Senior Staff Data Engineer
$275k - $450k • Toronto • Full-time
Posted 9d ago
About the job
Cohere is seeking a Senior Staff Data Engineer to lead the Data Foundation pillar of their Analytics and Data Insights team. This role is responsible for ensuring Cohere's data is trustworthy, governed, and accessible, managing the data warehouse, pipelines, access controls, and an agentic analytics layer. The position involves owning the full data lifecycle, from ingestion into BigQuery using Airflow and Cloud Run, to data modeling with dbt, and serving results through Looker, APIs, and analytics surfaces. The role also emphasizes infrastructure as code with Terraform and robust data governance practices, including VPC service controls and IAM patterns. The successful candidate will inherit a strong foundation and contribute to significant roadmap initiatives, including scaling the data framework, establishing an internal analytics agent with an evaluation harness, and centralizing institutional knowledge.
Responsibilities
- Build and lead a team of data and infrastructure engineers, setting technical standards and developing talent.
- Define and own the Data Foundation roadmap, including warehouse buildout, agentic analytics, data governance, and platform development.
- Manage the end-to-end data platform, covering ingestion, orchestration (Airflow, Cloud Run), data modeling (BigQuery, dbt), and serving layers (Looker, APIs).
- Define and implement data governance policies for human, service account, and agent access, including security controls and audit logging.
- Ensure platform reliability through alerting, anomaly detection, SLA management, and incident response.
- Lead the development of an internal analytics agent, including building an evaluation harness to measure accuracy and drive AI adoption.
- Establish company-wide analytics standards, including data modeling frameworks, naming conventions, and testing patterns.
- Collaborate with product, engineering, business insights, security, and legal teams on analytics surfaces, data marts, governance, and compliance.
Requirements
- 10+ years of experience in data engineering, data infrastructure, or analytics platform work, with a proven track record of leading data platform or infrastructure teams.
- Significant hands-on experience in data engineering or infrastructure, with the ability to interpret technical plans and logs.
- Production experience with cloud data warehouses (e.g., BigQuery, Snowflake), workflow orchestration (e.g., Airflow), and infrastructure as code (e.g., Terraform).
- Deep understanding of data modeling concepts, including fact/dimension tables, data layers, and semantic layers.
- Demonstrated ability to set team roadmaps based on company strategy and deliver cross-functional outcomes.
- Experience in operational excellence, including implementing reliable alerting, meeting SLAs, and managing incident response.
- Familiarity with data governance and security best practices.