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.
What is Sales Engineering at CoLab?
Sales Engineering at CoLab is a team of mechanical engineers who sit at the intersection of product, sales, and customer success. They act as product experts, industry experts, and the voice of the customer—playing a critical role in helping prospects and customers realize the full value of CoLab.
The team operates across three core functions:
- Sales Engineers (SEs): Focus on the pre-sales experience, partnering with prospective customers to evaluate CoLab and understand how it fits into their workflows and engineering challenges.
- Customer Solutions Engineers (CSEs): Work with existing customers to drive complex deployments and transform how teams collaborate. They help organizations adopt new ways of working enabled by CoLab to achieve ambitious outcomes.
- Mechanical Forward Deployed Engineers (MFDEs): Partner closely with specific customers to design and build tailored solutions for unique or high-impact problems, working alongside dedicated software engineering resources at CoLab.
While this role is focused on the pre-sales Solutions Engineer function, the strongest candidates bring a skill set that can flex across all three areas. Sales Engineers at CoLab are not siloed—they are adaptable, customer-centric, and capable of contributing wherever they can drive the most impact. As the team grows, we will be exploring how CSE’s and SE’s could become more of a single role.
All three functions regularly:
- Prepare and deliver engaging, specific demos that showcase how CoLab addresses customer pain points and delivers unique value.
- Partner with Account Executives and Customer Success Managers to solve challenging customer problems across diverse mechanical design and engineering use cases.
- Understand a customer’s current-state workflows, pain points, and how they map to business outcomes.
- Map how customers work today to CoLabs capabilities, and challenge them on new ways of working with what CoLab unlocks.
- Be a trusted advisor to customers and prospects, on what is possible with AI in the context of mechanical engineering today, and in the future.
- Partner with Product Managers on new product initiatives to incorporate the perspective of a mechanical engineer in what we’re building.
- Share customer insights with Product to ensure we’re always building what our customers need.
- Act as an instructor to cross functional teams at CoLab for engineering topics. Example: “What is Injection Molding, what is DFM in this context.”
- Work with Sales, Customer Success, Marketing, and Product to improve go-to-market strategy and enhance the customer experience.
What You Specialize in as a pre-sales SE.
CoLab is a category-creating product, which means you’re not just showing a tool, you’re helping people understand a new way of working. As a pre-sales Sales Engineer, you specialize in guiding everyone from end users to executives in seeing what’s possible and why it matters for how they work today.
You will specialize in:
- Tailored demonstrations for different industries, use-cases, and customers.
- How we position CoLab in initial conversations and our sales process for mapping their challenges to CoLab's solution.
- The execution of evaluation periods with potential customers.
- Clearly articulating business value, ROI, and impact to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Support customer onboarding and success transitions by ensuring alignment from first value to long-term adoption.
What you’ll need:
- Brings broad industry exposure—whether in automotive, aerospace, heavy equipment, medical devices, or another complex mechanical space.
- Equally comfortable in front of a whiteboard or a C-level boardroom—able to translate engineering problems into business outcomes.
- Able to work cross-functionally with Sales, Product, Marketing, and CS teams.
- Strong communicator, adept at tailoring technical discussions to different audiences.
- Comfortable juggling multiple strategic and tactical initiatives in parallel.
- Industry Domain expert - you have deep knowledge and experience with knowledge of CAD/PLM tools
- Ability to comprehend use cases and demonstrate industry domain expertise to establish credibility with customers.
- Ability to break down complex topics into easy to digest information
Who you are:
- A mechanical engineer by background, with real-world experience in product development, engineering processes, and design.
- One team, one mission - you are a team player with an ownership mindset and no ego.
- Relationship builder - you are able to build trust and strong relationships with customers and internal CoLab stakeholders.
- Broadcaster - you have excellent communication and presentation skills, with a strong ability to convey your message.
- Achiever - you are able to make your own content, deliver demos, and autonomously strive to hit tough timelines
- Bonus points if you have been a solutions (sales) engineer before.
The extra details:
- Compensation: This is a full-time, permanent position with a competitive compensation package that includes an executive stock options package.
- Benefits:
- Canada: This role offers an extended health and benefits package that includes unlimited paid vacation and RRSP matching.
- USA: This role offers health and dental insurance (covered at 100% for the employee) and unlimited PTO.
- 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 or the USA.
Travel Expectations
While this is a fully remote role, travel is a consistent part of the job. There are three primary types of travel you can expect:
- Team Weeks: Once per quarter, the sales team or entire company gets together in person. These typically involve traveling out on a Monday and returning on a Thursday or Friday. Two of these each year are held at our headquarters in St. John’s, Newfoundland, and the others take place in more central locations that evolve as the team grows.
- On-sites: For more strategic accounts, we travel to meet customers in person during the evaluation process. These trips are focused on running workshops and building stronger relationships. Most on-sites involve one day with the customer, with travel on either side. Travel is primarily within North America, and you can expect roughly one trip per month on average.
- Conferences: Sales Engineers play a key role at industry events and conferences. These trips typically involve traveling out on a Monday and returning later that week. Conference attendance is shared across the team, and you can expect to attend one per year.