Editorial Director

Who are we? Our mission is to scale intelligence to serve humanity. We’re training and deploying frontier models for developers and enterprises who are building AI systems to power magical experiences like content generation, semantic search, RAG, and agents. We believe that our work is instrumental to the widespread adoption of AI. 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. We like to work hard and move fast to do what’s best for our customers. Cohere is a team of researchers, engineers, designers, and more, who are passionate about their craft. Each person is one of the best in the world at what they do. We believe that a diverse range of perspectives is a requirement for building great products. Join us on our mission and shape the future! About the Role We’re hiring an Editorial Director to run Cohere’s editorial function. That’s the part of the company responsible for everything we publish under our own name, in long form, with our own voice. This isn’t a green-field role. You’ll inherit an established function with senior people already in seat and meaningful work already going out the door. Your job is to take what’s in motion, raise the standard, push the ambition, and give the function a sharper editorial center of gravity. This is not a content marketing role. We don’t need someone to scale a case-study library or run a blog calendar tuned to SEO. We need someone who can build a real editorial property. The kind of work people read on a Saturday morning because they want to, not because they were retargeted into it. Think Stripe Press. The early years of Airbnb’s magazine. Mailchimp’s Courier. MIT Technology Review at its best. A24’s editorial output. That register. You’ll own Cohere’s editorial vision, our publishing calendar, our writers (staff and freelance), and our long-form output across writing, film, photography, podcasts, and eventually books. You’ll be a peer to our Head of Brand Marketing and our Design Director. The three of you, reporting to the VP of Brand, set the creative direction of the company. You’re our head of storytelling, externally and internally. Externally, you build the editorial property and the body of work we publish under our name. Internally, you help the company tell its own story to itself, so the people making the work can feel what they’re a part of and why it matters. The role sits between art and science. The art is editorial taste: knowing what story is worth telling, who should tell it, and what register it lives in. The science is publishing discipline: running a real calendar, shipping on cadence, commissioning and editing at volume without losing the standard, and knowing how a piece actually finds its audience. We need both. People who can do one but not the other will struggle here. Who You Are You’re an editor in the old sense of the word. And the new sense too. The old-school part: you can read a draft and tell the writer what it’s actually about, including the parts they hadn’t realized yet. You commission well. You have a stable of writers, photographers, and filmmakers you trust, and they trust you back. You can talk about a piece of writing at the sentence level and at the strategic level in the same conversation. The new-school part: you think in formats, not just words. A story might want to be a 4,000-word essay, a short film, a photo series, a newsletter, a podcast, a thread. You know which form a story belongs in, and you know how a single idea can travel across surfaces without losing itself in translation. You don’t own social (the Social Lead does), but you watch it closely, you understand how it shapes contemporary publishing, and you know that what shows up there is often the public face of the editorial slate. Above all, you’re an integrator. You can look at a blog, a newsletter, a film series, a podcast, and a feed and see whether they read as one publisher or five. Getting them to read as one is part of the job. You also run things. You’ve shipped on deadline. You’ve held a calendar across multiple contributors. You’ve managed budgets. You know what it takes to keep a publishing operation moving without letting the standard slip. The romance of editorial work is real, but you don’t confuse it with disorganization. You’re culturally fluent across more than tech. You read widely: fiction, criticism, longform journalism, design and architecture writing, fashion, music, food, the internet. You have opinions about what’s good and why. You know the difference between a piece that’s informative and a piece that’s alive, and you reach for the second one whenever you can. What you do need is the ability to operate inside a fast-moving company with complex subject matter, without losing the editorial standard that made you good in the first place. What You’ll Own Editorial vision and standards Define what Cohere publishes, why, and to what standard. Be the person every piece of long-form work gets held against before it ships. Develop a clear editorial sensibility: what subjects we engage with, what we won’t do, and how all of that maps to Cohere’s broader brand strategy without flattening into it. Be the editorial standard-bearer internally. People should know what “we wouldn’t publish that” means when you say it. Voice and how Cohere sounds Own how Cohere sounds in everything we publish. Voice is the most distinctive thing about a publisher, and it’s yours to set and defend. The brand voice principles (the strategic framework, the tone-of-voice doc, the naming conventions) live with our Head of Brand Marketing. The execution of voice in actual published work, sentence by sentence, piece by piece, lives with you. Be the person who can read any piece of writing under our name, say whether it sounds like us, and articulate why it does or doesn’t. Publishing calendar and operations (the science) Build and run Cohere’s publishing calendar across all long-form channels. Annual themes, quarterly slates, weekly cadence. Hold it. Commission writers, photographers, filmmakers, and producers. Brief, edit, ship. Run editorial budgets, contracts, rights, and freelance operations with real discipline. Develop measurement frameworks that respect the form: depth of engagement, returning readers, cultural pickup, citations. Not vanity metrics that mistake reach for resonance. Long-form storytelling (the art) Lead the creation of Cohere’s most ambitious editorial work: essays, features, profiles, films, photo essays, podcasts, and, when ready, books or print. Find the stories worth telling that nobody else is telling well. Sometimes that’s about AI. Sometimes it’s about science, work, language, art, history, or the future. The connection to Cohere should be felt, not explained. Mix in original commentary, criticism, and reporting alongside more conventional brand storytelling. We want a point of view, not a brochure. Owned media properties Take ownership of Cohere’s existing owned-media surfaces (site, newsletter, content channels) and decide what to evolve, what to retire, and what to launch next. Podcast, print, eventually a publication or imprint if the work earns the right. Make our blog and other brand surfaces feel like they come from the same publisher. Bring the streams together: long-form essays, customer stories, product writing, films, photo work, the newsletter. Different forms, shared sensibility, one body of work. Cultivate a real readership. Subscribers, not impressions. People who open the email. Internal storytelling Be Cohere’s head of marketing storytelling internally as well as externally. The same narrative discipline that makes our published work Cohere should make our internal communication Cohere too. Help leadership translate marketing strategy into story. All-hands, kickoffs, strategy memos, internal updates: these are marketing storytelling artifacts.