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 and they deserve the same editorial attention as anything we publish externally. - Make the company vision accessible to the people making the work. The engineer shipping a feature, the designer making a launch asset, the AE walking into a sales meeting: they should all be able to articulate what Cohere is building and why, in language that connects what they're doing to the larger story. Your job is to give them that language. - Partner with the People team on employer brand and onboarding narrative, so what someone learns about who Cohere is when they join matches what they hear after they start. CONTRIBUTOR NETWORK - Develop and grow a roster of staff editors and writers, plus a freelance bench of writers, photographers, illustrators, and filmmakers we'd be lucky to publish. - Be the kind of editor great contributors actively want to work with, because the editing makes their work better and the platform takes their work seriously. PARTNERSHIP WITH BRAND, DESIGN, AND SOCIAL - Partner closely with our Head of Brand Marketing, who owns brand strategy, narrative, verbal identity framework, and campaigns. Your editorial slate and their briefs should be moving in the same direction. Sometimes their work is the runway for yours; sometimes yours is the runway for theirs. - Partner closely with our Design Director, who owns visual identity and design execution. Editorial work without serious design is a magazine nobody wants to read. You'll work together on the art direction of every major piece. - Partner with our Social Lead, who owns Cohere's organic social channels. You don't own social, but a lot of what shows up there is the public face of the editorial slate, so this is a close working relationship. The editorial sensibility and the social voice should feel like they're coming from the same publisher, not two different companies. - Coordinate with Product Marketing and Comms on launches and announcements. Your editorial calendar should make these moments land harder, without becoming a calendar of them. TEAM LEADERSHIP - Inherit and develop the existing editorial team: a senior content manager and a staff writer already in seat, both producing meaningful work. - Manage external partners: freelance contributors, photo and film producers, podcast production, print partners. - Set the standard for the team. Read everything before it ships, at least at the early stage. Build an editorial culture where high standards feel motivating, not punitive. HOW SUCCESS WILL BE MEASURED We measure editorial work by depth and by reach. Reader growth matters. Stories reaching more people each quarter is how editorial lifts the overall brand. We'll track: - Quality of work shipped, assessed against an explicit editorial standard, not a vibe. - 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 into places we'd want to be syndicated. Is the audience actually growing? - Audience depth: returning readers, podcast retention, time-on-page, share-through rates. Are readers coming back, not just arriving? - Cultural pickup: citations, inclusions in best-of lists, awards, syndication, conversations the work seeds. - Earned media on original editorial work. Coverage of pieces as journalism, not as marketing. - Contributor satisfaction. Are great writers, photographers, and filmmakers actively pitching us? - Internal signal: do people across Cohere feel connected to what we're building and able to articulate the story themselves? Is the work building our reputation, internally and externally, as a company that thinks and writes seriously about its world? The standard we won't apologize for: would the best version of this work hold up in a magazine you actually read? If not, it doesn't ship. 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 (written, filmed, recorded, edited, or commissioned) you can walk us through with conviction. - Real editor's chops. You can edit a draft at the sentence and structural levels, and you can articulate what you're doing and why. - A demonstrated ability to run a publishing operation: calendar, budget, contributor pipeline, rights, production. The unsexy part of the job is non-negotiable. - Cultural fluency across multiple worlds (journalism, design, fashion, music, art, the internet) and a track record of bringing that fluency into the work. - A working network of writers, photographers, filmmakers, and producers you'd want to bring with you. - Experience leading editorial teams and managing external creative partners. - The ability to operate inside a fast-moving company with complex subject matter. And the curiosity to actually engage with the subject matter, not just package it. BACKGROUNDS WE'D BE EXCITED ABOUT We're deliberately broad here. Strong candidates might come from: - Editorial leadership at magazines, newspapers, or digital publications (The Atlantic, Wired, The New Yorker, MIT Technology Review, Bloomberg, FastCo, The Verge, n+1, The Drift, Highsnobiety, Monocle, Aperture, Wallpaper). - In-house editorial leadership at culture-forward brands or platforms (Stripe Press, the Airbnb magazine era, Mailchimp's Courier, Shopify's editorial work, Figma's Config publication, Substack-native publications). - Book publishing or imprint leadership. - Documentary, podcast, or audio editorial leadership (Pushkin, Pineapple Street, Serial Productions, 99% Invisible). - Independent or founder-led publications with real cultural authority. Pure B2B content marketing experience is not what we're after. We want the editorial sensibility that gets you invited to publish in those places. 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, without it being a defensive one. - Experience launching a publication, imprint, or owned-media property from scratch. If some of the above doesn’t line up perfectly with your experience, we still encourage you to apply! 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 https://docs.google.com/forms/d/12a6IrLdF3kI2nonKSr4tiFuz18rLQbaeYV-JM9L4o9Q/edit, and we will work together to meet your needs. Full-Time Employees at Cohere enjoy these Perks: 🤝 An open and inclusive culture and work environment  🧑‍💻 Work closely with a team on the cutting edge of AI research  🍽 Weekly lunch stipend, in-office lunches & snacks 🦷 Full health and dental benefits, including a separate budget to take care of your mental health  🐣 100% Parental Leave top-up for up to 6 months 🎨 Personal enrichment benefits towards arts and culture, fitness and well-being, quality time, and workspace improvement 🏙 Remote-flexible, offices in Toronto, New York, San Francisco, London and Paris, as well as a co-working stipend ✈️ 6 weeks of vacation (30 working days!)