Senior Back End Developer

About CoLab
At CoLab, we help mechanical engineering teams bring life-changing products to market years sooner.
CoLab is a cloud based platform purpose built for fast, effective design review. Using CoLab, multiple engineers, designers, and other stakeholders can review designs together and build off one another's feedback. Engineers at companies like Ford, Komatsu, and Johnson Controls use CoLab to review designs faster, prevent mistakes, and build the next generation of innovative products.
About the Role

As a Senior Back End Developer (Software Developer IV) on our Build Scale Team, you are a technology advocate and a mentor within your team. You have an in-depth knowledge of the CoLab technology stack and how different components and services interact across the platform. You push for best practices and technical standards, and help guide the team technology direction towards simple, maintainable solutions.

Our Ideal Candidate
Experience working on SaaS, large-scale distributed systems and a consistent track record of building and maintaining highly scalable products would be considered an asset. 

Success will be measured by:

• On time delivery of new product features and changes
• Promotes clean and maintainable code and software development best practices
• Clear communication and technical leadership within team
• Self directed, takes ownership of tasks, stays apprised of broader team’s work
• Mentoring and advising others on the team

Job Responsibilities

• Understand complex customer problems and requirements and work in a team to build a solution that adds value for the customer and the product as a whole
• Collaborate with other team members to design and plan complex scopes of work from product requirements and UI/UX designs
• Develop, test, and ship critical user-facing features on a regular basis
• Develop, test, and maintain robust and scalable APIs.
• Participate in code reviews and help your team deliver high-quality software
• Advocate for all aspects of the user’s experience, with a focus on clarity and speed
• Contribute to tech technology direction and best practices
• Mentor, support, and be an information source to junior developers

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional, hands-on development experience
• Proficient in Python and its libraries, with hands-on experience in designing, developing, and maintaining robust and scalable APIs.
• Hands-on experience with relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL), NoSQL databases (e.g.: DynamoDB), vector databases (e.g., OpenSearch) and querying frameworks/APIs (e.g.: SQLAlchemy).
• Experience writing robust automated tests, including unit, as well as end-to-end (E2E) tests using Cypress or Playwright.
• Experience with Git workflow (pull requests, code reviews)
• Experience working with Monitoring / Observability tool (e.g, DataDog, Retool)

AI/ML Experience:

• Libraries: PyTorch, Hugging Face, Scikit-Learn
• Agent workflows: pydantic-ai
• Experience integrating and prompting large language models (LLMs) via APIs (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini)
• Experience working with ML services in the cloud infrastructure, e.g. Sagemaker, Bedrock, etc.
• Passion for working in teams with emphasis on respect and continuous improvement
• Willingness to raise your hand when you see something could be done / built better

Nice-to-have

• Familiarity with JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML and CSS
• Experience with React and front-end tools such as Webpack, Vite, npm and ESLint would be considered an asset
• GraphQL

Extra Details
Compensation: This is a full-time, permanent position with an attractive compensation package that includes a stock options package.
Benefits: This role offers an extended health and benefits package that includes unlimited paid vacation and RRSP matching.
Remote/Hybrid Work: Our main office location is in St. John’s, NL where we offer hybrid and remote opportunities. This role has the flexibility to work from anywhere within 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.