Senior Backend Developer

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. John’s, Newfoundland, CoLab has grown quickly from our first customer in 2019 to a rapidly scaling company. We’ve recently been recognized on Deloitte’s Fast 50™ and Fast 500™, and named a Canadian company to watch by The Globe and Mail and Financial Post.

About the Role

We're looking for a Senior Backend Developer to join our Build Operator team. 

Operator isn't a chatbot bolted onto our product. It's becoming the intelligence layer across CoLab, helping engineering teams search company knowledge, surface design decisions, answer complex questions, and generate insights from years of engineering work.

You'll join the team responsible for the backend systems that make this possible. That means building scalable retrieval pipelines, evolving our AI search infrastructure, integrating structured and unstructured engineering data, and developing the services that power intelligent experiences across the platform.

Over the next year, Operator will expand well beyond conversational search. You'll help build capabilities like company-wide knowledge retrieval, dynamic reporting, AI-generated dashboards, and personalized engineering insights that become embedded throughout CoLab.

This is a role for someone who enjoys solving deep backend problems. You'll spend far more time thinking about data architecture, search quality, retrieval systems, and scalable services than building user interfaces.

The work is complex and often ambiguous. This role exists because there often isn’t an existing pattern to follow.

Our Ideal Candidate

You're an experienced backend engineer who enjoys building systems that make complex information useful.

You like thinking about how data is organized, retrieved, and transformed into something customers can trust. Whether you're designing APIs, optimizing distributed systems, or improving search relevance, you care about building infrastructure that quietly powers exceptional product experiences.

You don't need previous experience building AI products, but you're excited about applying modern AI technologies to solve real customer problems.

You likely won't enjoy this role if:

• You prefer working primarily on frontend applications
• You want highly defined requirements before starting work
• You'd rather optimize existing systems than design entirely new capabilities

You'll thrive if:

• You enjoy designing backend systems from first principles
• You like difficult infrastructure and data problems
• You're curious about AI, search, and knowledge systems
• You balance technical excellence with pragmatism and collaboration

Job Responsibilities

• Design and build the backend services that power Operator
• Develop scalable retrieval systems that connect engineering knowledge across design reviews, notebooks, search, and other product surfaces
• Build APIs and services that enable AI-powered experiences throughout the platform
• Improve search quality, data pipelines, and knowledge retrieval performance
• Expand Operator's capabilities to support intelligent reporting, dashboards, and engineering insights
• Design systems that organize company knowledge across business units, engineering domains, and manufacturing processes
• Collaborate closely with AI, Product, Design, and Engineering to deliver customer-facing capabilities
• Improve reliability, observability, and performance across backend infrastructure
• Mentor teammates through architecture discussions, code reviews, and technical leadership

Qualifications

• 7+ years building production backend software
• Strong experience with Python and modern backend development
• Experience building APIs, distributed systems, and cloud-native applications
• Strong understanding of databases, system architecture, and scalable backend design
• Experience working with structured and unstructured data
• Comfortable making architectural decisions in evolving product environments
• Excellent communication skills with both technical and non-technical teammates

Bonus Points

• Experience building AI-powered applications or LLM workflows
• Experience with retrieval systems, semantic search, or RAG architectures
• Experience with vector databases or search infrastructure (TurboPuffer experience is a plus)
• Experience with embeddings, ranking, or information retrieval
• Experience with event-driven architectures
• Experience building enterprise SaaS platforms

The Extra Details

• This is a full-time, permanent position with competitive compensation and stock options
• We offer extended health benefits, unlimited paid vacation, and RRSP matching
• Our headquarters are in St. John’s, Newfoundland, with flexible hybrid and remote options. This role can be performed remotely 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 don’t meet every single qualification–your potential is what matters most to us.