Associate, Engineering Program Manager, Data at Cohere

Cohere is focused on building and deploying large language model (LLM) AI into enterprises in a safe and responsible way that drives human productivity, and creates magical new ways to interact with technology and real business value. We’re a team of highly motivated and experienced engineers, innovators, and disruptors looking to change the face of technology.

Our goals are ambitious, but also concrete and practical. Cohere wants to fundamentally change how businesses operate, making everyone more productive and able to focus on doing better what they do best. Every day, our team breaks new ground, as we build transformational AI technology and products for enterprise and developers to harness the power of LLMs.

Cohere was founded by three global leaders in AI development, including our CEO, Aidan Gomez, who co-created the Transformer, which makes LLMs possible. Collectively, we're driven by the belief that our technology has the potential to revolutionize the way enterprises, their employees, and customers engage with technology through language.

Cohere’s broader research team is world-renowned, having contributed to the development of sentence transformers for semantic search, dynamic adversarial data collection and red teaming, and retrieval augmented generation, often referred to as “RAG,” among other technological breakthroughs.

We have been deliberate in assembling a team of operational leaders with industry-leading experience, with backgrounds working at the most sophisticated, demanding, and respected enterprises in the world. Cohere’s operational leaders have built, scaled, and led multi-billion product lines and businesses at Google, Apple, Rakuten, YouTube, AWS, and Cisco.

The Cohere team is a collective from all walks of life, from people who left college to start businesses, to some of the most experienced people from globally renowned companies. We believe a diverse team is the key to a safer, more responsible technology, and that different experiences and backgrounds enable us to tackle problems from all angles and avoid blindspots.

There’s no better time to play a role in defining the future of AI, and its impact on the world.

We’re looking for an Engineering Program Manager with prior experience working within Data or ML in a Technical Project or Technical Program Management / Engineering Program Management capacity.

As a Data Engineering Program Manager, you will have a unique opportunity and responsibility to lead large-scale, cross-functional data programs, such as end-to-end evaluation of our foundation models, that are mission-critical for Cohere to succeed. Data is at the heart of LLM development — your job is to ensure that the modeling teams get the data they need! This will involve working across all of our Data teams working on Data Acquisition, Data Annotation, Data Evaluation, Data Engineering, and Annotation Tooling. Additionally, you’ll get to partner collaborate with teams all over the company, have significant impact on a fast-growing product, and contribute to the company culture.

- Proactive - their partners, stakeholders, and colleagues would describe them as someone who you don’t need to ping twice to get answers!

- Passionate about data and machine learning, with a particular interest in foundation models & generative models

- Comfortable collaborating with stakeholders, partners, and customers at all levels of seniority, and not afraid to hold them accountable

- Detail-oriented, extremely organized, and have a generally optimistic attitude towards making things better

- Excited to get their hands dirty and solve technical & non-technical problems & improve operations/processes at all levels of the organization

- Independent in the way they organize their work, priorities, reporting etc., but not afraid to ask for help when they get stuck

- Communicate with technical and non-technical stakeholders across Product, Engineering, Annotation, Design, and other teams, providing clear and timely updates, proactively flagging questions and concerns, and driving alignment wherever required

- Create and manage project schedules with clear dependencies, critical path and systematic methodology. Manage risks and mitigations, and re-plan as events warrant. Find ways to simplify reporting and asynchronous status updates for complex programs touching on numerous teams for stakeholder visibility

- Actively contribute to an Engineering culture that balances fast execution with a high bar for craftsmanship, emphasizing industry best practices and scientific rigor, while building processes that enable teams to move faster and more sustainably over time

- Dive deep into the problems and pain points of the Data teams and their partners. Find innovative ways to solve those problems, and help the teams implement those solutions

- Develop a role within the Data organization as a trusted leader in operational excellence, becoming the go-to person for ICs & Managers looking to kick-off new projects or programs

- Proactively identify ways to improve the way the Data organization operates, particularly focusing on implementing solutions that work at scale within a rapidly growing business unit

- 2-5 years of experience with project management, possessing the skills to structure, track and handle on-time work streams across multiple teams

- 2-3 years of experience leading cross-functional teams in delivering large-scale ML/Data programs

- In-depth understanding of the Data domain - you should have an understanding stemming from hands on experience on e.g. how models learn from data, how models are evaluated, how data quality assurance works at scale, data engineering best practices etc.

- Ability to use data and metrics to extract insights, back up or challenge assumptions, make recommendations, prioritize work and drive actions

- Self-motivated, independent, and proactive with a bias for action; demonstrated creative and critical thinking capabilities; can quickly (real-time) triage, prioritize, and lead cross- functional teams under pressure

- Experienced with NLP and passionate about working on cutting-edge technology within NLP; bonus points if you have experience also working with other modalities (audio, images etc.)

- Bonus points for experience in any of the following: Data Annotation (especially RLHF), Data Acquisition, Data - Engineering, Data Tooling, ML-assisted Labeling, AI Safety

- Bonus points for having experience of owning and managing large budgets

If some of the above doesn’t line up perfectly with your experience, we still encourage you to apply! If you consider yourself a thoughtful worker, a lifelong learner, and a kind and playful team member, Cohere is the place for you.

We value and celebrate diversity and strive to create an inclusive work environment for all. We welcome applicants of all kinds and are committed to providing an equal opportunity process. Cohere provides accessibility accommodations during the recruitment process. Should you require any accommodation, please let us know and we will work with you to meet your needs.

🤝 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 6 months for employees based in Canada, the US, and the UK

🎨 Personal enrichment benefits towards arts and culture, fitness and well-being, quality time, and workspace improvement

🏙 Remote-flexible, offices in Toronto, Palo Alto, San-Francisco and London and co-working stipend

✈️ 6 weeks of vacation

Note: This post is co-authored by both Cohere humans and Cohere technology.