Software Forward Deployed Engineer
Posted 3 days ago
The role in short
Embed with strategic customers to scope, build, and deploy complex system integrations and AI product features that connect customer systems to CoLab.
About CoLab
At CoLab, we help mechanical engineering teams bring life-changing products to market years sooner.
We build AI for engineers designing cars, medical devices, and jet engines. Products this complex aren't sketched and sent to production. Teams spend months on iterations, reviews, and tests, predicting how every part performs before anything is built. CoLab is where those reviews happen, and we capture the rationale behind every change. Other tools show what changed between versions. Only CoLab knows why. That's how our AI helps manufacturers like Bobcat, Triumph Motorcycles, and GE Appliances make better decisions, eliminate rework cycles, and get to market faster.
Proudly based in St. John’s, Newfoundland, CoLab started with one customer in 2018. Since then we’ve raised a $72M Series C, been named the 57th fastest growing company in North America by Deloitte (Fast 500™), signed multi-year AI partnerships with companies like Bombardier, and grown to a team of 250+.
About the Role
We’re hiring a Software Forward Deployed Engineer to embed within our strategic customers and deliver on high-impact, technically complex customer projects. This includes scoping, building, and deploying complex integrations, product features and AI product features that connect customer systems to CoLab, accelerate adoption and increase customer return on investment.
You’ll own delivery of key customer initiatives, working closely with our customer success, product, design and engineering teams, as well as leadership team stakeholders to remove blockers and deliver results.
Unlike a traditional software development role, FDEs must manage significant ambiguity, external team dynamics, and timeline pressure. If you like working directly with customers and shipping code to solve real, complex user problems with a high level agency and autonomy, then you will thrive in this role.
What You’ll Do
- Own delivery of strategic customer projects, from technical discovery through to production deployment and success measures
- Build and deploy complex system integrations, backend services, and data pipelines
- Interface with enterprise systems, including data lakes, identity management and access controls solutions, and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions
- Stand up CoLab integrations and organize incoming data to enable use in features like AutoReview and Operator
- Collaborate directly with customers to understand needs, propose solutions, and guide adoption
- Develop targeted solutions that meet the specific Customer's requirements whilst ensuring solutions are designed and developed with our broader customer base in mind.
- Bring your extensive knowledge of our Customer's requirements back to the development team for learning.
Our Ideal Candidate
- You're based in Cincinnati and are comfortable working on site with our customers
- You’ve delivered complex technical solutions for projects where requirements were not clearly defined
- You write clean, production-grade code in a variety of languages and consider yourself language agnostic
- You’re comfortable working in unfamiliar environments - both technically and organizationally
- You’ve worked with enterprise systems (e.g., data lakes, IdP, PLM, ERP, etc)
- You can break down ambiguity, sequence work, and adjust scope without losing momentum
- You’re confident leading deeply technical conversations with customer engineering or IT teams
- You care about delivering outcomes, not just writing code
- You have a “go figure it out” mindset and can roll with the punches when things shift
Bonus Experience
- Prior work embedding within customer environments as part of enterprise SaaS deployments
- Experience building or integrating AI-powered features
- Familiarity with manufacturing or engineering data, processes, or systems
- Experience with API-first products or developer platforms
Extra Details
- This is a full-time, permanent position with a competitive compensation package that includes, base salary and stock options
- Includes extended health benefits, unlimited vacation, and 401k matching
- This is and on site role based in Cincinnati, Ohio.
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.
Prep for this interview
4 questions likely to come up at CoLab Software, each matched to a line in this posting.
- 1Discovery and scoping
They wrote: “You’ll own delivery of key customer initiatives, working closely with our customer success, product, design and engineering teams, as well as leadership team stakeholders to remove blockers and deliver results.”
A customer says “we want AI in our claims process.” What do you ask in the first meeting?
How to answer
Why they ask: Most FDE work starts this vague. They want to hear you find the real problem before you pick a tool.
- Map the current process: who touches a claim, in what order, with which systems
- Find the slowest or most error-prone step and ask what it costs them
- Agree on one measurable goal (for example time per claim, or error rate)
- Ask what data you can access, and who signs off on security
Tip: Ask about the work, not the technology. Who does it today, how long it takes, what a mistake costs, and how they'd know it got better.
- 2Integrations and APIs
They wrote: “Build and deploy complex system integrations, backend services, and data pipelines”
Walk me through connecting our product to a customer's internal system that has no documentation.
How to answer
Why they ask: This happens weekly in the job. They want a calm, step-by-step method.
- Find who owns the system and get read access to a test environment
- Watch real traffic or logs to learn the data shapes
- Build a thin adapter with logging around every call
- Agree on how failures get reported, and who fixes what
Tip: Talk about finding the owner of the system first. The code is the easy part.
- 3Coding
They wrote: “You have a “go figure it out” mindset and can roll with the punches when things shift”
Build a small in-memory cache. Then add expiry. Then a size limit.
How to answer
Why they ask: Staged exercises show how your code holds up when requirements change mid-interview, like at a customer.
- Start with get and set on a dictionary, plus tests
- Store an expiry time with each value and check it on read
- Track use order and evict the least recently used entry when full
- Say what you'd change for many threads or many machines
Tip: Keep the first version simple and well tested so the next stage is a small change.
- 4Ownership and working with customers
They wrote: “You can break down ambiguity, sequence work, and adjust scope without losing momentum”
Tell me about a project where the requirements kept changing. What did you do?
How to answer
Why they ask: Ambiguity is the norm. They want proof you can keep moving without a clear spec.
- The project and why requirements kept moving
- What you did to pin them down (short demos, written decisions)
- The trade-offs you made to keep shipping
- The result, with a number if you have one
Tip: Show how you reduced the change, beyond how you coped with it.
Not the one? Get the next one by email
New roles land here every day. Pick what you want to hear about.
Want the job, not just the posting? Learn how FDEs work.
FDE Info is our free weekly newsletter for forward deployed engineers: tools, field notes from real deployments, and how FDE teams hire and pay.
Free. One email a week. Unsubscribe in one click.
