About CoLab
At CoLab, we want to help mechanical engineering teams bring life-changing products to market years sooner.
CoLab is a cloud based platform for engineering design review. We make it easy for subject matter experts (SMEs) across your business to access, evaluate, and comment on 2D drawings and 3D models. Our built-in AI peer checker, AutoReview, scans designs for common errors or non-compliance with your standards and guidelines. AutoReview creates markups and comments on your files, in context – just like a human checker.
With CoLab, human SMEs and AI work together to help you make better decisions and improve designs faster. We automatically capture knowledge from across your global business that would otherwise be buried in emails, spreadsheets, slide decks, and unknown locations in Sharepoint or PLM. Then, we make sure every lesson learned and every design guideline is applied exactly when it matters.
Companies like Johnson Controls, Komatsu, Schaeffler, and Polaris have launched products 40% faster, cut BOM costs by 50%, and reduced quality escapes by 15% in 1 year.
About the Role
As we’ve grown, so has our customer base. We’re working with larger, more complex customers global organizations with multiple business units, strict security requirements, and high expectations around reliability and governance.
Your job is to help make that complexity feel simple.
This is a Senior Full Stack role on our Enterprise team. You’ll focus on designing and evolving the foundational systems that make CoLab secure, scalable, and enterprise-ready: identity, permissions, tenant boundaries, data modelling, and cross-organization collaboration.Despite being a full stack role with frontend responsibilities you will be fairly backend-weighted.
Our Ideal Candidate
You think in systems.
You care about clean boundaries, tenant isolation, and making “secure by default” the easiest path. You’re comfortable debating tradeoffs in an architecture review—and equally comfortable diving into a tricky migration or debugging a production issue.
You don’t need heavy oversight. You proactively communicate, understand how your work fits into the broader roadmap, and raise the bar for those around you.
This role will energize you if:
- You enjoy foundational backend work.
- You want ownership from idea → rollout.
- You care about long-term maintainability, not just shipping features.
Job Responsibilities
- Design and evolve backend services and APIs that power enterprise workflows across organizations.
- Model and maintain complex relational schemas (Postgres) with strong tenant isolation, data scoping guarantees and performance considerations.
- Design and implement robust authorization patterns (RBAC, Scoped permissions, least privilege).
- Lead and contribute to initiatives such as user management redesign and identity provider (IDP) migrations.
- Build and maintain asynchronous workflows and background processing systems.
- Contribute to frontend development (React/TypeScript) to support enterprise configuration and permission management.
- Partner with Security to implement logging, validation, and operational guardrails.
- Improve reliability through thoughtful unit, integration, and E2E testing as well as improved observability, logging and proactive performance analysis.
- Mentor other developers through reviews, pairing, and design discussions.
- Participate in architectural design discussion, clearly articulating tradeoffs and helping define long-term system boundaries and patterns.
- Own delivery of major roadmap items from concept to production.
Qualifications
- 5+ years building and shipping production software.
- Strong backend experience (Python preferred) and API design (REST and/or GraphQL).
- Deep experience with relational databases and SQL (Postgres preferred).
- Experience designing multi-tenant systems and implementing authorization models
- Experience with asynchronous processing (queues, workers, background jobs).
- Working experience with React/TypeScript or strong FE/BE integration experience.
- Experience operating systems in production (debugging, observability, reliability improvements).
- Experience integrating with identity providers (SSO, SCIM, external services) is a strong asset.
Extra Details
- Full-time, permanent role with competitive compensation and stock options.
- Extended health and benefits package, including unlimited paid vacation and RRSP matching
- Remote-friendly across Canada, with optional hybrid work from our St. John’s, NL office.
- A high-ownership environment where you’ll work closely with Product, Design, Security, and CloudOps.
Equity Note
Frequently cited statistics show that people who identify with historically marginalized groups are likely to apply to jobs only if they meet 100% of the qualifications. We encourage you to help us break that statistic and apply even if you don’t meet every single qualification—your potential is what matters most to us.
Top Skills
What We Do
Engineers need better tools for working together. CAD and PLM systems aren’t built for the design conversations where collaboration truly happens. So engineers go outside of them, using emails and slideshows to get the job done. But when these critical design discussions live in siloed, manual tools, you’re missing vital insights on why engineering decisions are being made, what needs to improve, and how to steer your people in the right direction.
After struggling with the traditional email, PowerPoint, and screenshot-driven collaboration process used by over 90% of manufacturing teams today, our founders made a decision: if better tools didn’t exist, they’d build them. And so CoLab began.
CoLab is a web-based collaboration tool that lets your team share CAD, provide feedback with full mechanical context, and capture the critical design data that your other systems don’t—giving you a design review and collaboration process that’s standardized, simplified, and twice-as-fast.
Today CoLab is trusted by Fortune 500 companies like Johnson Controls and Hyundai Mobis, who use the platform to accelerate design cycles by 51%, drive continuous improvement, and reduce product costs and changes.
See how we’re changing the way engineers work together at www.colabsoftware.com
