Cohere Interview Experiences & Questions
2 real Cohere interviews shared by candidates: every round, the questions they were asked, how they answered, and whether they got the offer. Latest: Jun 2026.
What to expect at Cohere
Based on 2 real interviews
Roles
Machine Learning Engineer (1), Software Engineer (1)
The Cohere interview process
Most common round types: Coding (2), System Design (1), Technical (1).
Real Cohere interview questions
- Implement a webcrawler with BFS-like traversal.
- Design and build a streaming server that streams words like an actual LLM server.
- What are you most proud of building and why?
- Decode tokens from LLM using top K sampling without using PyTorch
- Why do you want to work at Cohere?
- Design knowledge distillation of models. Design LLM post training pipeline.
- Why do you want to move?
- Present a paper from a list provided by them
- System design round where they discussed how you would schedule jobs on a fleet of GPUs, so scheduling primitives, sizes of the models and how much cold start would take, prioritizing traffic and queueing systems to…
- How would you schedule jobs on a fleet of GPUs?
All 2 Cohere interview experiences
“The system design interview was data collection, SFT and RL stages. It went well for me. It was focused on LLM post training techniques. The ML coding was worst for me although I practiced the same…”
“The process was very practical and not leetcodey at all, though knowing the fundamentals like different types of traversals, rate limiting primitives, scheduling policies did help. The interview…”
Frequently asked questions
How many rounds are in the Cohere interview?
Candidates report a typical 3.5 rounds, usually including a recruiter screen, take-home assignment, technical round, final / onsite round.
How hard is the Cohere interview?
Candidates rate it 4.0/5 on average (difficult), across 2 interviews.
How long does the Cohere hiring process take?
About 4 weeks from first contact to decision, based on reported timelines.
What percentage of Cohere candidates get an offer?
0% of candidates with a final result got an offer (0 of 1).
What does the Cohere interview focus on?
The most common round types are Coding, System Design, Technical.