Software Forward Deployed Engineer - Cincinnati

About CoLab

At CoLab, we help mechanical engineering teams bring life-changing products to market years sooner.

We build AI for engineers designing cars, medical devices, and jet engines. Products this complex aren't sketched and sent to production. Teams spend months on iterations, reviews, and tests, predicting how every part performs before anything is built. CoLab is where those reviews happen, and we capture the rationale behind every change. Other tools show what changed between versions. Only CoLab knows why. That's how our AI helps manufacturers like Bobcat, Triumph Motorcycles, and GE Appliances make better decisions, eliminate rework cycles, and get to market faster.

Proudly based in St. John’s, Newfoundland, CoLab started with one customer in 2018. Since then we’ve raised a $72M Series C , been named the 57th fastest growing company in North America by Deloitte ( Fast 500™ ), signed multi-year AI partnerships with companies like Bombardier , and grown to a team of 250+.

About the Role

We’re hiring a Software Forward Deployed Engineer to embed within our strategic customers and deliver on high-impact, technically complex customer projects. This includes scoping, building, and deploying complex integrations, product features and AI product features that connect customer systems to CoLab, accelerate adoption and increase customer 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 and Operator
• Collaborate directly with customers to understand needs, propose solutions, and guide adoption
• Develop targeted solutions that meet the specific Customer's requirements whilst ensuring solutions are designed and developed with our broader customer base in mind.
• Bring your extensive knowledge of our Customer's requirements back to the development team for learning.

Our Ideal Candidate

• You're based in Cincinnati and are comfortable working on site with our customers
• 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 deeply technical 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 and stock options
• Includes extended health benefits, unlimited vacation, and 401k matching
• This is and on site role based in Cincinnati, Ohio.

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.