Solutions Architect, Defence, DACH

Role details

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? In this role as a Solutions Architect (SA) for Cohere in the DACH region, you will play an instrumental part in growing Cohere’s defence business across Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the wider European region, with Germany as the main focus. You will partner with account executives, our partner ecosystem and executive leadership to help the region's defence and security organisations adopt AI securely and at scale, building on Cohere's success with organisations in defence and the public sector. These customers need AI that runs on their own infrastructure, often air-gapped or at the tactical edge, and that can handle classified information. SAs at Cohere sit at the cross-section of Forward Deployed Engineering and AI transformation. Our SAs embody the following traits: - Technical experts in the field - Trusted advisors to customers and colleagues - Product evangelists of Cohere technology - Thought leaders in pushing the frontiers of applied AI Responsibilities include developing a deep understanding of customer problems, mapping them to Cohere solutions, and working closely with our partners as the trusted technical advisor who owns the technical relationship with our stakeholders. By leveraging your expertise, you will help to increase the adoption of Cohere products, both internally and externally, and will gather valuable insights and feedback from customers to help shape the future of our products. In this dynamic and demanding role, you will need to be both a strategic thinker and a builder. You will personally lead the design and deployment of customer pilots that showcase the impact of our technology to strategic enterprise and government customers. You will own the customer's technical narrative end to end, from discovery and architecture to pilot results and business case, and bring structured customer feedback back to our Product and Engineering teams. A typical day at Cohere might include: - Leading the technical talk track on customer calls. - Designing enterprise architectures for North deployments, including on-prem, air-gapped and sovereign cloud setups that meet German and EU requirements such as GDPR, BSI C5 and the EU AI Act. - Designing for classified and disconnected environments (VS-NfD and above, air-gapped, DDIL and tactical edge), together with the customer's IT security and accreditation teams. - Deep dives on customer queries and Cohere technology. - Working with customer executives to prioritise use cases, define success metrics and build the business case for AI adoption. - Translating defence and operational requirements into AI use cases, from logistics, maintenance and training to intelligence analysis and staff work. - Facilitating customer evaluations and pilots inside their stack - Owning the technical response of RFPs and public tenders, including defence procurement, from security questionnaires to mapping the customer's requirements specification (Lastenheft) to our solution. - Developing and documenting processes to enable the solutions architect team and adjacent teams to scale effectively within Cohere. - Collaborating with the Product and Engineering teams to ensure our offering matches the customers’ needs. - Working closely with our partners (system integrators, defence companies and sovereign cloud providers), who lead many of the larger deals in Germany, to develop a strategy for enabling and accelerating their customers. This might be for you if you have some of the following: - 3+ years in customer-facing technical roles where you both built and advised, such as consulting data scientist, forward deployed engineer, deployment strategist, or solutions architect, taking AI or data solutions from executive problem framing to production. - A passion for Agentic AI, and a practical understanding of where LLMs deliver value in production, and where they don't. - Solid grounding in ML fundamentals (training, evaluation, retrieval etc.) and the ability to design evaluation frameworks for customer pilots. - Excellent communication skills - you can toggle seamlessly between presenting to CEOs, and getting in the weeds with technical audiences. - You thrive in ambiguity and can put high-impact structure and processes in place where none exist. - Comfortable working with Python and Assistive Coding tools - Experience in or with the defence sector, e.g. in the Bundeswehr (including reserve service), at a defence company, in federal IT or at NATO, and a deep understanding of how defence organisations buy and run IT. - Eligible and willing to undergo a German security clearance (Sicherheitsüberprüfung under the SÜG, Ü2 or higher). An existing clearance is a strong plus. - Preferred: experience in the German defence market, e.g. at a system integrator or consultancy, or working on RFPs and public tenders. - Must have: Professional fluency in English and German (C1 or higher, verhandlungssicher) Please note: for this role we are open to a range of experience levels, from Associate to Staff-level Individual Contributors (ICs). Experience level stated is a bare minimum. We also welcome and support emp