Solutions Architect - Public Sector
$245k+Application analysis
Solutions Architect - Public Sector at Cohere is a forward deployed ai company role for engineers who want customer-facing technical work with real deployment ownership.
Reading this role
This Solutions / Sales Engineering role centers on technical discovery, demos, POCs, and helping buyers build internal consensus. Key signals from the listing: Active security clearance mentioned, Clearance eligibility required, Kubernetes / containers, Python.
About Cohere
This company is building AI products where forward deployed engineers translate capabilities into customer outcomes quickly. The role is anchored in Washington, DC, so expect on-site customer work in that region.
Signals in the listing
Stand out for Solutions Architect - Public Sector
- Lead your application with one paragraph tying Solutions Architect - Public Sector to a specific customer or deployment you owned — Cohere hires for shipped outcomes, not tool lists.
- Bring a tight demo narrative: customer pain, live workflow, and measurable before/after — treat the interview like a compressed POC.
- Show how you qualify opportunities and say no to bad-fit pilots; Cohere values technical judgment in customer-facing roles.
- State clearance status clearly up front (active, expired, or eligible) and mention any prior NIPR/SIPR, IL5, or government cloud accreditation work — recruiters filter on this early.
- For Kubernetes-heavy roles, describe a cluster you operated: upgrades, networking, secrets, observability, and how you debugged a production outage.
- This role is tied to Washington, DC — mention willingness to work on-site with customers and any existing ties to that market (clients, partners, or domain knowledge).
Stand out at Cohere
- Demonstrate rapid prototyping with a concrete example — Cohere will probe for specifics, not buzzwords.
- Demonstrate customer discovery with a concrete example — Cohere will probe for specifics, not buzzwords.
- Expect questions about real deployments, safety tradeoffs, and how you partner with customers on week one.
- Read recent engineering blog posts, product launches, and customer stories on cohere.com — reference one explicitly in your outreach to show genuine interest.
Tailored from this listing’s title, company, and description. Always verify requirements on the company careers page before applying.
Role description
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 co-headquartered in Toronto and San Francisco, with key offices in London, New York City, Montreal, Seoul, Germany and Paris. Join us! Why this role? In this role as a Solutions Architect at Cohere, you will play a significant role in growing Cohere’s Public Sector business and have a great deal of autonomy when it comes to technical pre-sales and post-sales. In order to qualify for this exciting career opportunity, you must have a Security Clearance. 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 role, you will need to be both a strategic thinker and a hands-on doer. You will take a hands-on approach to building customer Proof of Concepts that showcase the business value of our platform. As the technical relationship owner, you will collaborate with stakeholders to understand their business objectives and translate those into technical solutions. You will take ownership of the customer narrative, serving as the voice of the customer and acting as a liaison between the customer and our product team. Additionally, you will provide guidance on best practices for using Cohere, identify areas for improvement within the platform, and cultivate technical champions within customer organizations to drive adoption and gather feedback to enhance our products.
A typical day at Cohere might include:
- Leading the technical talk track on customer calls.
- Deep dives on customer problems and Cohere technology.
- Designing novel enterprise solutions with bleeding-edge NLP technology.
- Facilitating customer evaluations and PoC’s.
- Developing and documenting processes to enable the solutions architect team 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 to develop a strategy for enabling and accelerating their customers.
This career opportunity is a good match for you if you have:
- Must have: Security Clearance
- 5+ years of public sector customer-facing technical pre/post sales Solutions Architect (or similar) experience.
- 2+ years architecting or deploying NLP/AI/LLM Solutions.
- A passion for Generative AI, and an understanding of strengths and weaknesses of Generative LLM's and AI technologies.
- Comfortable working with Python and Jupyter Notebooks.
- Excellent communication skills - you can toggle seamlessly between presenting to CEOs, and getting in the weeds or white boarding with technical audiences.
- High tolerance for ambiguity.
- You can identify and implement high-impact processes in unstructured environments.
- Preferred: Experience managing Kubernetes clusters
- Preferred: Experience with networking (firewalls, DNS, cert management, etc)
- Preferred: Familiarity with authentication protocols/frameworks (SAML, OAuth, etc)
Cohere is committed to fair and transparent pay practices. The salary range listed for this role reflects the expected base compensation. Actual compensation offered will be determined by factors such as location, level, job-related knowledge, skills, education, and experience. For candidates in Washington, the Compensation Range is: 205,000 - 245,000
How And Where We Work:
- Cohere is remote-friendly. We have offices in Toronto, San Francisco, New York City, London, Paris, Montreal, and more coming soon.
- For those in the office: a daily lunch program, plenty of snacks, and regular community and social events.
- For those not near an office: a co-working benefit so you can work alongside others in your city.
If any of the above doesn’t line up exactly with your experience, we still encourage you to apply. We strive to create an inclusive work environment for all; we welcome applicants from all backgrounds and are committed to providing equal opportunities. Should you require any accommodations during the recruitment process, please submit an Accommodations Request Form https://docs.google.com/forms/d/12a6IrLdF3kI2nonKSr4tiFuz18rLQbaeYV-JM9L4o9Q/edit, and we will work together to meet your needs. We may use AI-enabled tools to screen and assess applicants against the criteria for this position. This helps our recruiters identify potentially qualified candidates, but it doesn't limit the applications our recruiters may review or consider.