Product Manager, Public Sector & Defence

Cohere Inc.

Job Overview

Location

Canada

Job Type

Full-time

Full Job Description

📋 Description

• As a Product Manager for Public Sector & Defence at Cohere, you will serve as the critical bridge between government customers and internal product teams, ensuring that North—Cohere’s agentic AI platform—meets the stringent security, compliance, and operational demands of Canadian public sector and defence environments. This senior, customer-facing role is pivotal in shaping how frontier AI is responsibly adopted by institutions that safeguard national interests, where your work directly influences product strategy, regulatory alignment, and mission-critical deployments.
• You will own the public sector product roadmap for North, translating complex government requirements—including data sovereignty, Protected B/C and Secret classifications, Privacy Act compliance, Algorithmic Impact Assessments, accessibility standards, and official languages obligations—into prioritized, actionable product investments. By synthesizing direct customer input, deal requirements, and evolving regulatory landscapes, you will ensure that engineering and design teams build features that are not only innovative but also fully compliant and deployable in highly regulated environments.
• Day to day, you will collaborate closely with Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs), Applied Machine Learning Engineers, Strategic Customer, and Engineering Program Management teams to scope and build custom AI agents and solutions tailored to specific public sector accounts. You will partner with GTM and EPM teams to support RFP responses, technical evaluations, and procurement processes, ensuring Cohere’s capabilities are accurately represented and competitively positioned. Additionally, you will build and maintain trusted relationships with departmental CIOs, IT directors, and technical leads, acting as an advisor on AI adoption in constrained, high-stakes environments.
• You will work within a world-class team of researchers, engineers, and designers at Cohere, a company dedicated to scaling intelligence to serve humanity through frontier AI models. The Public Sector & Defence PM role sits at the intersection of product, compliance, and vertical strategy, offering a unique opportunity to influence how AI is governed and deployed in Canada’s most sensitive institutions. You will be immersed in a culture that values technical excellence, diverse perspectives, and rapid iteration—where your contributions directly impact the capabilities and value of Cohere’s models for national-scale use cases.
• In this role, you will develop deep expertise in the intersection of AI product management and public sector regulation, gaining rare experience in navigating security frameworks, procurement processes, and mission-driven technology adoption. You will sharpen your ability to translate technical complexity into clear, compelling narratives for senior government officials and non-technical stakeholders, while building a strategic product vision that balances innovation with compliance. This position offers significant growth potential for professionals aiming to lead AI strategy in regulated industries or advance into senior product leadership roles focused on enterprise and government markets.

🎯 Requirements

• 7+ years of product management experience, with meaningful time in enterprise SaaS, infrastructure, or platform products sold into regulated industries.
• Direct experience working with or within Canadian government, defence, or public sector organizations, whether as a vendor, contractor, or public servant.
• Strong cross-functional collaborator who can align engineering, sales, legal, and customer teams around a shared plan without formal authority.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills; able to present to senior government officials and translate technical concepts for non-technical decision-makers.
• Eligible to obtain Top Secret Canadian government security clearance.

🏖️ Benefits

• Impact: Shape how Canada's most important public institutions adopt and deploy frontier AI.
• Innovation: Work alongside leading researchers and engineers solving complex ML challenges.
• Growth: Competitive compensation, equity options, and opportunities for professional development.
• Flexibility: Hybrid work model, with Ottawa or Toronto preferred given proximity to government customers.
• Full health and dental benefits, including a separate budget for mental health care.
• 100% Parental Leave top-up for up to 6 months.
• Personal enrichment benefits towards arts and culture, fitness and well-being, quality time, and workspace improvement.
• 6 weeks of vacation (30 working days!).

Skills & Technologies

AWS

Azure

Product Management

Remote

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Cohere Inc.

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About Cohere Inc.

Cohere provides large language models and retrieval-augmented generation APIs for enterprise developers to embed conversational AI, search, summarization, and content generation into applications. Founded in 2021 by former Google Brain researchers, the company offers cloud and on-premise deployment, fine-tuning tools, and multilingual support to help organizations automate workflows, improve customer support, and analyze unstructured data while maintaining data privacy and security controls.

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