Job Description
About CoLab At CoLab, we help mechanical engineering teams bring life-changing products to market years sooner. CoLab is the AI platform for driving stronger engineering decisions. Every design review in CoLab builds a knowledge repository of design feedback, decisions, and lessons learned - which AI agents draw from to flag issues on future designs before they compound. The more your team works in CoLab, the smarter it gets and the faster you arrive at the ideal design. Companies like Ford, Komatsu, and Johnson Controls use CoLab to catch issues earlier, eliminate rework cycles, and bring products to market faster. Founded in St. Johnâs, Newfoundland, CoLab has grown quickly from our first customer in 2019 to a rapidly scaling company. Weâve recently been recognized on Deloitteâs Fast 50⢠and Fast 500â˘, and named a Canadian company to watch by The Globe and Mail and Financial Post. About the Role Weâre hiring a Senior Back End Developer to join our Build Viewing teamâfocused on a new product offering with a heavy data component at its core. Youâll be the sole back end developer on this team. Thatâs intentional. You wonât be handed neatly scoped tickets or wait on someone else to define the architectureâyouâll own it. This role is about building the systems that make complex engineering data usable, fast, and reliable. Youâll design and implement services in Python, model and optimize data in Postgres, and work closely with frontend engineers to bring entirely new workflows to life. A typical week might include designing a data model to support large-scale design datasets, debugging a performance bottleneck that only appears under real customer load, or pushing back on a proposed approach because you see a simpler, more scalable path. This is not a maintenance role. Youâre building something new, where the right technical decisions early will matter a lot later. Our Ideal Candidate You like being the person others rely on for backend decisionsâand you take that responsibility seriously. Youâre comfortable working with ambiguity. There wonât always be a clear âright answer,â and youâre expected to move things forward anyway. You care about dataâhow itâs structured, queried, and scaled. Youâve felt the pain of bad schemas or slow queries, and you know how to avoid them. You wonât thrive here if you need tightly defined specs, heavy oversight, or a large backend team to lean on day-to-day. This role requires autonomy and strong technical judgment. If the idea of owning a critical part of a new productâwithout a safety netâsounds energizing, youâll likely do well here. Job Responsibilities Own the backend architecture for a new data-heavy product offering Design and implement services in Python that are reliable, scalable, and maintainable Model, query, and optimize complex datasets in Postgres Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks in data-intensive workflows Collaborate closely with frontend developers to shape APIs and user-facing functionality Make pragmatic tradeoffs between speed of delivery and long-term scalability Establish patterns and standards that future backend developers can build on Qualifications 7+ years of backend development experience in a production environment Strong experience with Python and relational databases (Postgres preferred) Proven ability to design data models and optimize query performance Experience building and maintaining APIs for data-heavy applications Comfortable owning systems end-to-end, from design through production Experience with writing robust unit tests Extra Details Full-time, permanent position with competitive compensation and stock options Extended health benefits, unlimited paid vacation, and RRSP matching Remote-first, with flexibility to work from anywhere in Canada 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 donât meet every single qualificationâyour potential is what matters most to us.