Engineering Manager

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 currently on the hunt for our next Engineering Manager to own our Build Engage team. As the EM, you’ll be responsible for CoLab’s Reviews feature set, one of the most visible, heavily used, and business-critical parts of the product.

Reviews are where engineers collaborate remotely: viewing CAD models, leaving feedback, iterating together, and ultimately making better design decisions. It’s the connective tissue between collaboration, feedback, and our AI-powered review workflows.

You’ll lead a team of ~10 engineers who are ambitious, deeply engaged, and proud of what they ship. They care about craft, about each other, and about not wasting time. Your job is to help them grow, stay healthy, and continue delivering high-quality UI/UX-heavy work. 

You’ll partner closely with a strong PM, design, and product leadership. You won’t be asked to blaze a brand-new frontier alone — but you will be expected to make good product calls, manage tradeoffs, and keep the team grounded when priorities shift.

What You’ll Own

• The health, growth, and performance of the Build Engage engineering team
• Delivery and evolution of core reviews functionality, including feedback loops, collaboration workflows, and visibility into CAD models
• UI/UX-heavy roadmap areas like reviews, notifications, and shared ownership of navigation and related surfaces
• Clear communication up, down, and sideways — especially in a product area that’s always in the spotlight
  
  

What Success Looks Like

• Engineers feel supported, challenged, and understood as individuals
• The team ships consistently, even when priorities change, without losing its sense of identity
• Stakeholders trust you to represent tradeoffs clearly and advocate realistically for capacity
• Reviews continues to feel intuitive, responsive, and essential to customers’ daily workflows
  
  

Our Ideal Candidate

You might be a great fit if you:

• Lead with warmth, empathy, and clarity — and genuinely enjoy the people side of management
• Come from a frontend or UI-leaning background and can still dive into technical discussions when needed
• Are product-minded and pragmatic, not dogmatic
  Know how to push a high-performing team to grow without pushing them over the edge
• Are comfortable managing a large team (~10 direct reports) with varying strengths and needs
  
  

Qualifications

• Experience managing and developing engineering teams in a product-focused environment
• Strong communication skills with engineers, product managers, designers, and leadership
• Technical fluency, especially in frontend or UI-heavy systems
• Experience navigating changing priorities while protecting team health
  
  

Extra Details

• Full-time, permanent role with competitive compensation and equity
• Extended health benefits, unlimited paid vacation, and RRSP matching
• Remote-first across Canada, with optional hybrid work from St. John’s, NL
  
  

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.