Product Manager, Agent Harness & Modelling

Job 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 headquartered in Toronto with key offices in London, New York City, San Francisco, Montreal, Paris, Berlin and Seoul. Join us! ABOUT COHERE AND NORTH Cohere is revolutionizing enterprise AI with North, an agentic AI platform designed to securely deploy AI agents and automations within organizations' infrastructure. North empowers employees to streamline workflows, automate repetitive tasks, and unlock actionable insights while ensuring data privacy and compliance. North combines cutting-edge generative and search models with customizable integrations to drive productivity and innovation at scale. ROLE OVERVIEW We are seeking an Agent Harness Product Manager to own the execution layer that makes North agents reliable, capable, and production-ready. This is a role that sits at the intersection of three domains: - Agent Loop and Execution: Own the core agent runtime: tool orchestration, parallel execution, sub-agent delegation, sandbox code execution, and failure recovery. You will define how North agents plan and act across long, multi-step workflows and ensure the execution environment is robust enough for the most demanding enterprise tasks. You are expected to engage at the implementation level, contributing to architecture decisions alongside engineering rather than simply handing off requirements. - Context Engineering: Own how our Agents manage the context window as a deliberately controlled resource. This includes progressive disclosure of tools and skills, context compaction and summarization, offloading of large payloads to a persistent filesystem, and the instrumentation that keeps agents oriented across extended trajectories. - Model-Scaffolding Co-evolution: Own the feedback loop between North's harness and the Modeling Team. This PM is the connective tissue that makes that possible: ensuring harness design decisions are validated by Modeling before they are built, that evals are the shared bridge between both teams, and that as the harness evolves the model evolves with it. RESPONSIBILITIES - Define and own the roadmap for North's agent harness, including the agent loop, context engineering layer, tool orchestration, sandbox execution, and sub-agent delegation - Serve as the primary interface between North engineering and Cohere's Modeling team, ensuring new harness capabilities are validated before being built and that neither team paints itself into a corner - Own North's agentic evaluation framework, ensuring evals are compatible with both the North harness and Modeling's training infrastructure, and that they serve as a reliable bridge between product and research - Engage enterprise customers to surface real-world agentic failures and translate findings into concrete product and model requirements - Stay current with the open-source and commercial agent ecosystem and drive adoption decisions that keep North's architecture aligned with emerging standards. REQUIREMENTS - 5+ years of product management experience in agentic AI systems, developer infrastructure, or applied ML products - Deep understanding of modern LLM agent architectures, including multi-agent systems, tool-augmented reasoning, memory and retrieval, programmatic orchestration, RAG, and long-horizon execution - Strong grasp of agentic evaluation design, including how to measure task completion, failure recovery, and long-horizon reliability, and how to diagnose model vs. scaffolding gaps - Technically deep enough to contribute to architecture decisions at the implementation level: comfortable reviewing and shaping design docs, reasoning about async execution patterns, sandboxed environments, filesystem design, and the tradeoffs that come with building harness capabilities into a production platform - Ability to flex between ML research conversations and engineering architecture discussions with equal fluency - Track record of shipping platform-layer products with demonstrated impact on reliability, performance, or capability. NICE-TO-HAVES - An active practitioner of agent frameworks who regularly builds with and follows the latest developments in open-source harnesses, coding agents, and orchestration tools in both professional and personal work - Hands-on experience with enterprise agentic deployments: multi-tenant orchestration, tool permissioning, audit trails, and compliance requirements - Familiarity with infrastructure constraints relevant to enterprise deployments: on-premises environments, scalability challenges, and the operational tradeoffs of running complex agent workloads in restricted or air-gapped settings - Prior work at the intersection of research and product, translating nascent model capabilities into shipped product features - Background working within or closely alongside an ML research or post-training team WHY JOIN COHERE? - Impact: Shape how Canada's most important public institutions adopt and deploy frontier AI. - Innovation: Work alongside leading researchers and engineers solving complex ML challenges. - Growth: Competitive compensation, equity options, and opportunities for professional development. - Flexibility: Hybrid work model with offices in key global locations (Toronto, Montreal, New York, San Francisco, London, Paris, and Korea) FULL-TIME EMPLOYEES AT COHERE ENJOY THESE PERKS: - A weekly lunch stipend of $75/£75 or equivalent in your local currency for lunch. - Full health and dental benefits, including a separate budget for mental health. - RRSP matching, 401K, Pension Scheme. - 100% Parental Leave top-up for up to 6 months, for either parent. - Annual enrichment benefits: Arts & culture, fitness/wellness, quality time, and a workspace improvement credit. Education & learning stipend for conferences, courses, and coaching. - 6 weeks of paid vacation (30 working days!) - Budget for traveling to other offices if you are remote, plus an annual company offsite. HOW AND WHERE WE WORK: - Cohere is remote-friendly, but we also have offices in Toronto, London, New York City, San Francisco, Montreal, Paris, Berlin and Seoul with more opening 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. - Everyone receives a $500 home office stipend to set up your workspace properly. 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. Beware of Scams: Cohere will never ask for payment or third-party services (e.g., CV writing) as part of our hiring process. All legitimate roles are listed on the Cohere careers page and LinkedIn only, with all communications from Cohere employees coming from an @cohere.com or @cw.cohere email alias. If jobs are viewed on other sites then please verify these through our official careers https://cohere.com/careers page.