Forward Deployed Engineer

About CoLab

 

At CoLab, we 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

We’re hiring Forward Deployed Engineers to embed within our strategic customers and deliver on high-impact, technically complex customer projects. That includes scoping, building, and deploying complex integrations that connect customer systems to CoLab, accelerating adoption and increasing their return on investment.

You’ll own delivery of key customer initiatives, working closely with our customer success, product, design and engineering teams, as well as leadership team stakeholders to remove blockers and deliver results.

Unlike a traditional software development role, FDEs must manage significant ambiguity, external team dynamics, and timeline pressure. If you like working directly with customers and shipping code to solve real, complex user problems with a high level agency and autonomy, then you will thrive in this role.

 

What You’ll Do

• Own delivery of strategic customer projects, from technical discovery through to production deployment and success measures
• Build and deploy complex system integrations, backend services, and data pipelines
• Interface with enterprise systems, including data lakes, identity management and access controls solutions, and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions
• Stand up CoLab integrations and organize incoming data to enable use in features like AutoReview
• Design and implement new AI-powered interfaces, including validation UIs and natural language chat
• Collaborate directly with customers to understand needs, propose solutions, and guide adoption
• Contribute back - codify repeatable work into internal tools, patterns, or documentation
• Give product feedback that sharpens our roadmap and improves real-world performance of features like AutoReview and our Enterprise API

 

Our Ideal Candidate

• You’ve delivered complex technical solutions for projects where requirements were not clearly defined
• You write clean, production-grade code in a variety of languages and consider yourself language agnostic
• You’re comfortable working in unfamiliar environments - both technically and organizationally
• You’ve worked with enterprise systems (e.g., data lakes, IdP, PLM, ERP, etc)
• You can break down ambiguity, sequence work, and adjust scope without losing momentum
• You’re confident leading conversations with customer engineering or IT teams
• You care about delivering outcomes, not just writing code
• You have a “go figure it out” mindset and can roll with the punches when things shift

Bonus Experience

• Prior work embedding within customer environments as part of enterprise SaaS deployments
• Experience building or integrating AI-powered features
• Familiarity with manufacturing or engineering data, processes, or systems
• Experience with API-first products or developer platforms

 

Extra Details

• This is a full-time, permanent position with a competitive compensation package that includes, base salary, as well as performance-based commission and stock options
• Includes extended health benefits, unlimited vacation, and RRSP/401k matching
• You can work remotely from anywhere in Canada, following the eastern time zone 

 

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.