Technical Program Manager, AI Delivery for Public Sector & Defense, Germany

Who are we?Cohere is the leading security-first enterprise AI company. We build cutting-edge foundation AI models and end-to-end products that are designed to solve real-world business problems.

We’re training and deploying frontier models for enterprises who are building AI systems. We believe that our work is instrumental to the widespread adoption of AI and we are looking for folks that want to be part of that.

We obsess over what we build. Each one of us is responsible for contributing to increasing the capabilities of our models and the value they drive for our customers. Cohere is a team of researchers, engineers, designers, and more, who are all passionate about their craft.

We are a global technology company headquartered in Toronto with key offices in London, New York City, San Francisco, Montreal, Paris, Berlin and Seoul. Join us!

Why This Role?

We're seeking an experienced Program Manager to join Cohere's customer-facing Program Management team, with a focus on public sector and defence accounts in Europe, particularly in Germany. This is a highly specialised role requiring an individual who understands technical program delivery, the technical complexity of frontier AI models and the unique requirements of government and defence organisations.

You will be the critical bridge between our cutting-edge AI capabilities and the specific needs of Ministries, Agencies, and defence organisations across Europe. You'll navigate complex procurement processes, stringent security requirements, data sovereignty concerns, and regulatory compliance while ensuring our customers successfully deploy and scale our AI solutions.

In this role, you'll collaborate with our Strategic Customer team, Applied ML (AML) Engineering, Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE), Platform, Product, and Go-to-Market teams, serving as the technical program lead and trusted advisor for our most sensitive and high-impact government and defence engagements.

Location: Germany

Eligibility: This individual must be a German citizen living in Germany and fluent in German, enabling immediate engagement with critical defense and national security customers.

Security Clearance: German security clearance is not required, but is a strong nice-to-have.

What You'll Do

Customer Program Leadership:

• Own end-to-end technical program delivery for Germany and broader European public sector and defence customers, from initial deployment through production scaling

• Serve as the primary technical program point of contact for customers, building trusted relationships with departmental CIOs, IT directors, and technical teams

• Translate complex public sector and defence requirements (security, compliance, accessibility, bilingualism, data sovereignty) into actionable engineering plans

• Navigate complex procurement processes, RFP responses, and contractual technical obligations.

Strategic Communication:

• Provide clear, timely, and objective communication across Cohere's engineering organisation, customer stakeholders, pubic sector and defence leadership

• Translate between AI/ML technical concepts and government-appropriate language for decision-makers who may not have deep technical backgrounds

• Present technical roadmaps and status updates to senior stakeholders including departmental executives

• Represent Cohere's technical capabilities in sensitive government and defence contexts.

Complex Program Management:

• Create and manage project schedules that account for public sector and defence timelines, security review processes, and approval cycles

• Identify and manage dependencies across government departments, security authorities, cloud service providers, and internal Cohere teams

• Navigate risks unique to government and defence deployments: privacy compliance, security, political and regulatory, technology and infrastructure.

• Drive alignment between product development priorities and specific customer requi...