POSTED Jan 21
Sr. Engineering Program Manager, Modeling
at Cohere ⋅ London / New York City / San Francisco / Toronto
Who are we?
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.
Why this role?
We’re looking for an Engineering Program Manager to join Cohere’s Tech organization to focus on the development of our Machine Learning solutions, with a focus on our foundation models and embeddings teams. You should have hands-on experience managing projects for not just software-based, but ML-powered consumer products and building large-scale foundational processes and programs to improve engineering operations.
In return, you will have the unique opportunity and responsibility to design the way that Cohere will operate for years. You’ll get to build relationships with some of the leading AI and NLP minds in the world, collaborate with other Cohere teams like Product, Business, and Marketing, have significant visibility and impact on a fast-growing product, and contribute to the company culture. You will learn about and help solve challenges unique to large-scale ML model development and bringing their power to customers.
Please Note: We have offices in Toronto, London and San Francisco, but embrace being remote-first! There are no restrictions on where you can be located for this role.
As an Engineering Program Manager, you will:
- Communicate: Provide clear, timely and objective communication across the tech organization, between Cohere teams, to company leadership, and with external partners & customers.
- Optimize: Coordinate ideation-to-action and break down complex issues into strategies to drive engineering alignment with product, business, and marketing, maintaining teamwork and collaboration. Be the voice of expertise when it comes to operational excellence.
- Plan: Create and manage project schedules with clear dependencies, critical path and systematic methodology. Manage risks and mitigations, and re-plan as events warrant. Drive alignment across the organization and between teams.
- Execute: Drive on-time delivery and deployment, identifying development and feasibility needs, and establishing achievements for checkpoints and status updates.
- Problem solve: Proactively identify issues and solutions, and marshal resources necessary to attack and resolve blockers. Coordinate with teams to identify, track, and prioritize impacts to schedule and product quality, especially across cross-functional collaborations and dependencies.
- Drive Culture: Build relationships and be a trusted colleague to turn challenges into solutions throughout the Tech Org and across the company. Use your big-picture perspective and leverage this to impact culture, making everyone’s day-to-day workflow better, and fundamentally improve cross-functional relationships at Cohere.
- Inspire: Build your ML domain understanding to provide supportive partnerships with other Cohere leaders. Nurture an environment where everyone in the team can share openly, commit to their responsibilities, and collectively work towards achieving the goal.
You may be a good fit if you:
- Have 3+ years working as an Engineering or Technical Program or Project Manager in direct partnership with machine learning engineers on consumer product development. Will consider less EPM or TPM experience if you have professional experience as an ML developer or ML scientist.
- Have owned the delivery of multiple consumer-facing software products requiring large organizations (50+ employees) to execute to a delivery schedule (experience leading and supporting new “0-to-1” initiatives is a plus); startup experience is great, but you should have also spent multiple development cycles on an established product.
- Can give multiple examples demonstrating the project management skills to structure, track and handle several simultaneous machine learning work streams across cross-functional (e.g. engineering, product, business) teams.
- Use data and metrics to extract insights, back up or challenge assumptions, make recommendations, prioritize features, and drive actions.
- Are an expert at communicating concisely and effectively in a variety of ways, and can instill confidence and trust with key partners (e.g. business, product, marketing, designers, OS engineers, ML researchers) with your initiative.
- Consider yourself to be self-motivated, resilient, and inspiring with a bias for action; demonstrate creative and critical thinking capabilities; can quickly (real-time) triage, prioritize, and lead under pressure.
- Are comfortable with ambiguity and have a successful track record of navigating complexity clearly and decisively.
- Familiar with Cohere and experience with the NLP product space (especially LLMs and Embeddings models) before you apply and are excited about the application of machine learning to solve language-specific consumer challenges.
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.
Our Perks:
🤝 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.