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 live with our Head of Brand Marketing. The execution of voice in actual published work 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.

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 about AI, science, work, language, art, history, or the future.
• Mix in original commentary, criticism, and reporting alongside more conventional brand storytelling.

Owned Media Properties

• Take ownership of Cohere's existing owned-media surfaces and decide what to evolve, retire, or launch next.
• Make our blog and other brand surfaces feel like they come from the same publisher.
• Cultivate a real readership. Subscribers, not impressions.

Internal Storytelling

• Be Cohere's head of marketing storytelling internally as well as externally.
• Help leadership translate marketing strategy into story.
• Make the company vision accessible to the people making the work.
• Partner with the People team on employer brand and onboarding narrative.

Contributor Network

• Develop and grow a roster of staff editors and writers, plus a freelance bench of writers, photographers, illustrators, and filmmakers.
• Be the kind of editor great contributors actively want to work with.

Partnership with Brand, Design, and Social

• Partner closely with Head of Brand Marketing, Design Director, Social Lead, Product Marketing, and Comms teams.

Team Leadership

• Inherit and develop the existing editorial team.
• Manage external partners: freelance contributors, photo and film producers, podcast production, print partners.
• Set the standard for the team. Read everything before it ships.

How Success Will Be Measured

• Quality of work shipped, assessed against an explicit editorial standard.
• Adherence to the publishing calendar: cadence, on-time delivery, budget.
• Readership growth: net subscribers and readers added each quarter, story-level reach, organic discovery, syndication.
• Audience depth: returning readers, podcast retention, time-on-page, share-through rates.
• Cultural pickup: citations, inclusions in best-of lists, awards, syndication, conversations seeded.
• Earned media on original editorial work.
• Contributor satisfaction.
• Internal signal: do people across Cohere feel connected and able to articulate the story.

What You Bring

• 15+ years in editorial leadership roles, with a clear track record of shipping ambitious long-form work at a high standard.
• A portfolio you can walk us through with conviction.
• Real editor's chops: editing at sentence and structural levels.
• Ability to run a publishing operation: calendar, budget, contributor pipeline, rights, production.
• Cultural fluency across multiple worlds.
• A working network of writers, photographers, filmmakers, and producers.
• Experience leading editorial teams and managing external creative partners.
• Ability to operate inside a fast-moving company with complex subject matter.

Backgrounds We'd Be Excited About

• Editorial leadership at magazines, newspapers, or digital publications.
• In-house editorial leadership at culture-forward brands or platforms.
• Book publishing or imprint leadership.
• Documentary, podcast, or audio editorial leadership.
• Independent or founder-led publications with real cultural authority.

Pure B2B content marketing experience is not what we're after.

Nice to Have

• Direct experience writing or commissioning work about technology, science, or AI for a general audience.
• A point of view on how publishing is changing in the age of generative AI.
• Experience launching a publication, imprint, or owned-media property from scratch.

Diversity and Inclusion

We value and celebrate diversity and 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, and we will work together to meet your needs.

Perks

• An open and inclusive culture and work environment