Public Sector Lead, Defence & Security

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 UK public sector and defence accounts. 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 UK Government and defence organisations. 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 engagements. Location: UK Security Clearance: Active Top Secret clearance preferred; candidates with Active Secret cleara

About Scale AI Scale AI accelerates the development and deployment of AI, from the high-quality training data and evaluation services that power the world's leading AI labs, to full-stack AI applications built for Enterprise, U.S. Public Sector, and Global Public Sector customers. We don't just hand over a model; we find the highest-value use case, build the system around it, and own the outcome, whether that's an agent supporting mission planning for the Department of Defense, a sovereign AI platform for a government ministry, or an agentic workflow inside a Fortune 500 enterprise. Our platform powers breakthroughs at the frontier of AI, and great design is how we make that power accessible, intuitive, and trusted by the teams who rely on it every day. The Role We're looking for a product design leader to lead and grow our enterprise team. What You'll Do Set the direction for Enterprise design. Define what exceptional design looks like for Scale's Applications customers making high-stakes decisions and for the expert contributors powering the platform. Translate the broader design vision into a clear, motivating direction for your team. Build and lead the team. Own hiring, development, and day-to-day leadership for a growing team of designers. Create the culture and operating rhythms that let them do their best work. Drive design execution across the Enterprise product. Partner with your Product and Engineering counterparts to set priorities and ensure design is involved from problem scoping through delivery, not brought in at the end. Raise the craft bar. Uphold design principles and quality standards on your team. Push designers beyond digitizing workflows toward genuinely rethinking how people work with AI. Hold the line on quality without slowing delivery. Contribute to the design system. Help shape and adopt Scale's shared design system, championing consistent component use and contributing patterns back so a distributed team can build coherently at speed. Gro

The UK is making a wholesale shift to AI. The government's AI Opportunities Action Plan set out to "mainline AI into the veins" of the country, and the focus has now moved to delivery: the Incubator for AI ( i.AI ) is shipping tools like the Humphrey suite into departments, a Sovereign AI Unit and AI Growth Zones are being stood up, and civilian departments are under real pressure to move from pilots to production. Scale can play a foundational role in building the reliable AI applications that shift depends on. We're looking for someone to lead that work in central government. This isn’t about staying in the office and managing a team of sales people, its about building the business from the front. You'd own our commercial relationships across civilian departments, starting where the near-term pipeline is strongest: HMRC, DWP, and NHS. This is a critical role reporting directly to the new Public Sector leader. You'd carry a number, win deals yourself, and build a small team behind you as the work grows. It suits someone who has sold into these departments before and knows how they actually make decisions, not just how the org charts look. What you'll do Own our commercial plan and pipeline for UK civilian central government Find, shape, and close deals yourself, from the first conversation through to contract and into delivery Use the relationships you already have across departments like HMRC, DWP, and NHS Work the frameworks, tenders and teaming, and know which route to market is worth the effort and which isn't. Be a credible counterpart to senior civil servants, and turn what they need into work we can deliver Stay close to our product and delivery teams so what we sell is what we build Hire and lead a small team over time, and help shape the wider UK public sector plan with the UK Public Sector Lead What we're looking for You've sold and delivered technology or transformation work to UK civilian central government, either from a vendor or from inside governmen

Scale’s rapidly growing Global Public Sector team is focused on using AI to address critical challenges facing the public sector around the world. Our core work consists of: Creating custom AI applications that will impact millions of citizens Generating high-quality training data for custom LLMs Upskilling and advisory services to spread the impact of AI As a Full Stack Software Engineer (Forward Deployed), you’ll collaborate directly with public sector counterparts to quickly build full-stack, AI applications, to solve their most pressing challenges and achieve meaningful impact for citizens. At Scale, we’re not just building AI solutions—we’re enabling the public sector to transform their operations and better serve citizens through cutting-edge technology. If you’re ready to shape the future of AI in the public sector and be a founding member of our team, we’d love to hear from you. You will: Serve as the lead technical strategist for public sector engagements, converting ambiguous mission requirements into robust architectural roadmaps and guiding onsite implementation. Architect the fundamental frameworks for production-grade AI applications, setting the gold standard for how interactive UIs, backend systems, and AI models are integrated at scale to deliver reliable outcomes. Guide the evolution of cloud infrastructure, ensuring security, global scalability, and long-term system integrity across all environments. Direct the development of core platforms and shared services, ensuring they solve cross-cutting needs for diverse global client use cases. Partner with cross-functional leadership to steer the technical roadmap, mentoring senior and junior staff and ensuring all products align with a cohesive, future-proof technical architecture. Bridge the gap between the field and the core platform by turning real-world client lessons into the reusable patterns that power the entire engineering team. Ideally you’d have: Masters or Phd in Computer Science or equivale

About the role Scale's Global Public Sector team is focused on using AI to address critical challenges facing the public sector around the world. As a Staff Applied AI Engineer, you'll raise the bar for how AI gets built, governed, and evaluated across the team. You'll define standards that other engineers adopt, such as evaluation methodologies for agents and MLOps practices, while acting as the senior technical voice for the most sensitive AI decisions our clients face. What you'll do Define standards for responsible AI, model governance, and production MLOps that get adopted broadly across the Global Public Sector team Build or validate the highest-risk parts of strategic AI systems and use those systems to establish standards other teams can adopt. Architect AI systems designed to prevent systemic failure, and lead the resolution of the most severe incidents tied to model safety or data integrity Build reusable AI capabilities, such as production-ready agent implementations built on proven architectures, fine-tuned models, or evaluation methodologies, that other engineers and clients can build on Advise on which new AI developments are worth adopting, and help set the technical roadmap for the domain Act as the senior technical partner to client leadership on AI strategy Coach Senior Applied AI Engineers, delegate ownership of technical domains, and build systems and practices that enable multiple teams to deliver safer AI Contribute to recruiting and representing Scale's AI work externally What we look for 7+ years of engineering experience, with a multi-year track record owning AI/ML systems in production Experience judging the quality of training data, selecting the right adaptation method for a given model, evaluating fine-tuning results, and balancing serving cost, latency, and quality trade-offs Experience owning an AI-powered product end to end, including direct involvement in the AI's behaviour rather than implementing ML work scoped by another team A tr

About the team OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. OpenAI for Government (OAI4G) helps public-sector institutions understand, adopt, and deploy highly capable AI products in support of their missions. The team brings together Sales, Solutions, Partnerships, Technical Success, Legal, Security, Policy, Global Affairs, and other cross-functional partners to help governments use AI responsibly and effectively. As part of OAI4G’s International Public Sector team, you will help public institutions in the UK, Middle East (ME) and Latin America (LATAM) translate frontier AI into secure, compliant, mission-aligned outcomes. We work across varied procurement, regulatory, security, sovereignty, and commercial environments, while maintaining a consistent commitment to safety, reliability, and public benefit. About the role We are seeking a Global Account Director (GAD) to lead OpenAI’s public-sector work across the UK, ME and LATAM. You will build trusted relationships with government leaders, develop and execute account strategies, create and close complex opportunities, and help customers move from initial interest to successful adoption. This is a full-cycle, highly cross-functional sales role that combines technical understanding, strategic vision, partnership management, and value-driven execution. You will work with senior government, operational, technical, procurement, policy, and security stakeholders to identify high-impact AI use cases and translate them into credible commercial and deployment pathways across the OpenAI Platform API and Codex and ChatGPT Enterprise. You will also be an accountable customer leader after signature, working alongside specialist delivery and technical teams to keep customer outcomes, milestones, adoption, risks, and executive alignment on track. The role requires excellent judgement, executive presence, local fluency, and the ability to move between strategy, discovery, capture, pr