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Cohere, a leading enterprise AI company headquartered in Toronto, is seeking an experienced Technical Program Manager to lead customer-facing program delivery for public sector and defence accounts across Europe, with a primary focus on Germany.
In this role, you will serve as the critical bridge between Cohere's cutting-edge AI capabilities and the specialized needs of European government ministries, agencies, and defence organizations. You'll own end-to-end technical program delivery from initial deployment through production scaling, acting as the primary technical point of contact for departmental CIOs, IT directors, and technical teams.
Key responsibilities include:
**Customer Program Leadership:** Own technical program delivery for German and broader European public sector and defence customers. Translate complex government and defence requirements—including security, compliance, accessibility, bilingualism, and data sovereignty—into actionable engineering plans. Navigate complex procurement processes, RFP responses, and contractual technical obligations.
**Strategic Communication:** Provide clear, objective communication across Cohere's engineering organization and customer stakeholders. Translate AI/ML technical concepts into government-appropriate language for decision-makers without deep technical backgrounds. Present technical roadmaps and status updates to senior stakeholders and represent Cohere's capabilities in sensitive government and defence contexts.
**Complex Program Management:** Create and manage project schedules accounting for public sector timelines, security review processes, and approval cycles. Identify and manage dependencies across government departments, security authorities, cloud providers, and internal teams. Navigate risks unique to government deployments: privacy compliance, security, political/regulatory, and infrastructure challenges. Drive alignment between product development priorities and customer requirements.
**Technical Delivery & Execution:** Ensure on-time delivery of AI solutions meeting security, privacy, accessibility, and performance standards. Coordinate technical work across multiple teams including model customization, security hardening, government system integration, and bilingual support. Establish governance checkpoints appropriate for high-stakes deployments. Problem-solve complex technical challenges in air-gapped, on-premises, or highly regulated environments.
Cohere is remote-friendly with offices in Toronto, London, New York City, San Francisco, Montreal, Paris, Berlin, and Seoul. The company offers comprehensive benefits including health/dental coverage, RRSP matching, 100% parental leave top-up for up to 6 months, 6 weeks paid vacation, education stipends, and a $500 home office stipend.
**Requirements:**
- 6+ years of experience as a customer-facing Technical or Engineering Program Manager in AI/ML consulting, technology transformation, or enterprise software delivery
- Excellent executive communication and stakeholder management skills
- Proven experience working with government, defence, or heavily regulated customers
- Demonstrated track record managing complex, multi-stakeholder technical programs with stringent compliance requirements
- Bachelor's degree in a relevant field (advanced degree or technical certifications a plus)
- Strong understanding of enterprise software deployment architectures (cloud, on-premises, hybrid, air-gapped)
- Working knowledge of modern AI: LLMs, agentic systems, MCP, RAG, fine-tuning, evals, and responsible AI
- Comfortable discussing API integrations, model inference, data pipelines, and ML operations with technical stakeholders
- Deep understanding of how government and defence organizations procure, evaluate, and deploy technology
- Familiarity with European government requirements: data sovereignty, privacy laws, accessibility standards, official language obligations, security classifications
- Understanding of defence and national security considerations in AI deployment
- **Must be a German citizen living in Germany and fluent in German**
- Eligible to obtain German security clearance
**Nice to Have:**
- Active German security clearance
- Bilingual (English/German) proficiency
- Background in European defence, intelligence, or critical infrastructure sectors
- Experience with GC Cloud services (Azure, AWS GovCloud) or Protected B/C environments
- Project management certification (PMP, PgMP) or government-specific methodologies
- Experience with Algorithmic Impact Assessments or AI ethics frameworks
About Cohere
AI / Data / Infrastructure — enterprise generative AI models and tooling for businesses.
