Senior Back End Software Developer

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.

We’re hiring a Senior Back End Developer to join our Build Viewing team—focused on a new product offering with a heavy data component at its core.

You’ll be the sole back end developer on this team. That’s intentional. You won’t be handed neatly scoped tickets or wait on someone else to define the architecture—you’ll own it.

This role is about building the systems that make complex engineering data usable, fast, and reliable. You’ll 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. You’re building something new, where the right technical decisions early will matter a lot later.

You like being the person others rely on for backend decisions—and you take that responsibility seriously. You’re comfortable working with ambiguity. There won’t always be a clear “right answer,” and you’re expected to move things forward anyway. You care about data—how it’s structured, queried, and scaled. You’ve felt the pain of bad schemas or slow queries, and you know how to avoid them. You won’t 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 product—without a safety net—sounds energizing, you’ll likely do well here.

• 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

• 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

• 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

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.