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 applicationsYou want highly defined requirements before starting workYou'd rather optimize existing systems than design entirely new capabilities You'll thrive if: You enjoy designing backend systems from first principlesYou like difficult infrastructure and data problemsYou're curious about AI, search, and knowledge systemsYou balance technical excellence with pragmatism and collaboration Job Responsibilities Design and build the backend services that power OperatorDevelop scalable retrieval systems that connect engineering knowledge across design reviews, notebooks, search, and other product surfacesBuild APIs and services that enable AI-powered experiences throughout the platformImprove search quality, data pipelines, and knowledge retrieval performanceExpand Operator's capabilities to support intelligent reporting, dashboards, and engineering insightsDesign systems that organize company knowledge across business units, engineering domains, and manufacturing processesCollaborate closely with AI, Product, Design, and Engineering to deliver customer-facing capabilitiesImprove reliability, observability, and performance across backend infrastructureMentor teammates through architecture discussions, code reviews, and technical leadership Qualifications 7+ years building production backend softwareStrong experience with Python and modern backend developmentExperience building APIs, distributed systems, and cloud-native applicationsStrong understanding of databases, system architecture, and scalable backend designExperience working with structured and unstructured dataComfortable making architectural decisions in evolving product environmentsExcellent communication skills with both technical and non-technical teammates Bonus Points Experience building AI-powered applications or LLM workflowsExperience with retrieval systems, semantic search, or RAG architecturesExperience with vector databases or search infrastructure (TurboPuffer experience is a plus)Experience with embeddings, ranking, or information retrievalExperience with event-driven architecturesExperience building enterprise SaaS platforms The Extra Details This is a full-time, permanent position with competitive compensation and stock optionsWe offer extended health benefits, unlimited paid vacation, and RRSP matchingOur 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.