Engineering Program Manager, Generative ML 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.

A Cohere Engineering Program Manager is seen as an operational expert specializing in cross-functional efforts. While the role is still relatively new - we are a startup, after all - the EPM team already has a battle-tested reputation of adding significant value. Staff with this title will be expected to both show up like an owner to strategically plan ahead, and constantly go “hands-on” to tactically execute.

Candidates will be successful at Cohere if they thrive in an environment containing a high level of change and ambiguity. Natural skill in developing relationships with smart and stubborn people, creative lateral thinking skills in new situations, and proven organizational abilities across a tangle of work streams are critical for an EPM to build trust, solve problems, and add value.

EPMs with these skills will be uniquely rewarded at Cohere. They will build strong 1:1 partnerships with the best people in the AI industry. They will immediately have leadership opportunities across Cohere, with company-level visibility and impact. At this stage in the company where we’re helping to define the industry but have significant customers, the EPM expertise they bring will have an incredible multiplier effect on success; you can essentially change things as fast as you can execute on them.

And candidates will be exposed to and get to learn amazing new things. LLMs are one of the most important technologies of our generation, and EPMs will be deeply immersed in the area alongside executive, research, development, marketing, and sales teams in contexts and scenarios they wouldn’t get anywhere else. One minute they might be taking notes in a XF meeting you’re running with a key Cohere customer, the next minute they might be DMing our CEO with an ask from their teams.

Please Note: While we are a remote-first company, for this role, we prefer candidates on the U.S. East Coast or in Europe (to more closely collaborate with the relevant teams) and have offices in Toronto, NYC and London.

- Across all EPM specializations:

- Break down complex and ambiguous issues into strategies to drive engineering effort forward and creatively attack and resolve blocking issues.

- Troubleshoot cross-team challenges and build dependable partnerships both within ML & engineering and with other departments like product, business, and marketing.

- Both own and enable a useful communication flow of priorities, ideas, and knowledge throughout all layers of the tech organization.

- Ensure the your program & projects are represented to other Cohere teams, to and from company leadership, and with external partners & customers.

- Understand the product and technical context of your programs, such that you can independently interface with all program stakeholders.

- Respond quickly to program-level changes, clarifying new scope and marshaling resources in response to evolving priorities.

- Project positivity, calm, and competency in all your interactions.

- As a Cohere EPM specializing in Generative ML

-Partner directly with Gen ML modeling leadership & members of technical staff on efforts to design, train and improve our core generative models.

- Coordinate across ML partner teams like Data, Evaluation, and Safety, and Engineering partner teams like Model Efficiency and Model

- Serving on cross-team planning and execution to deliver Generative models more safely, faster, and more reliably.

- Work with other Cohere organizations like Product, Marketing, and Business to strategically develop and represent our Generative technical solutions both inside and outside the company.

- Have fundamental knowledge of how machine learning works, and basic knowledge of NLP and Large Language Models (LLM)

- Have personal hands-on understanding of the unique challenges of managing projects and programs in the AI/ML development space (be prepared for us to ask you about your experiences in this area).

- Have a background of being “process-agnostic” in your approach to leading projects & programs; you aren’t tied to a specific framework, but can be flexible and adapt to any given situation.

- Have the capacity for critical self-reflection, a thorough understanding of your own strengths and weakness, and the desire to improve your professional capabilities over time.

- For a Cohere EPM specializing in Generative ML

- Have 3-5 years with Engineering Program Manager or Technical Program Manager as your job title.

- Have 2+ years of experience working directly on an AI/ML-powered product or feature.

- You will be preferred if you: Have hands-on professional experience with large language models (LLMs) and/or you have experience helping to develop large foundation models.

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.