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Cohere Software Engineer Interview Experience

Cohere · Senior

ResultWaiting
Timespan5 weeks
DifficultyDifficult
Rounds4

Interview process

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 process is a bit long, lots of wait between rounds but overall, it's smooth.

Interview rounds · 4

  1. 1

    Recruiter screen

    1. Q1. What are you most proud of building and why?
    2. Q2. Why do you want to work at Cohere?
    3. Q3. Why do you want to move?
  2. 2

    Take-home assignment

    Coding
    1. Q1. Design and build a streaming server that streams words like an actual LLM server.
      How they answered

      Get the edge cases right!

  3. 3

    Technical round

    1. Q1. Implement a webcrawler with BFS-like traversal.
      How they answered

      You can google APIs and syntax but the coding is all manual.

  4. 4

    Final / onsite round

    It was a system design and a hiring manager round

    1. Q1. 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 manage load.
    2. Q2. How would you schedule jobs on a fleet of GPUs?
      Follow-up questions
      • Scheduling primitives, model sizes
      • How much cold start would take?
      • How to prioritize traffic and queue systems to manage load?

Tips from the candidate

Prepare CS fundamentals, rate-limiting, queueing primitives, scheduling, learn about their models and products and play with their APIs

Company culture

The team seems smart but humble and mostly excited to be there! They seem to be working on some cool stuff.

Details

CompanyCohere
RoleSoftware Engineer
LevelSenior
LocationUnited States
InterviewedMay 2026
Questions asked7