Mechanical Forward Deployed Engineer - Cincinnati

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

This is a high-impact role that helps define how CoLab delivers technical value to its most strategic customers in Aerospace and Defence. CoLab is a category-creating product, which means adoption isn't just a rollout. It's a change in how the organization works.

In this role, you'd act as a trusted advisor, leveraging people, process, and technology to help teams rethink how they manage feedback, data, and decision-making across design and PLM. That means getting deep into customer workflows, testing new ways of working, and building repeatable methods the rest of the team can scale.

You'll work alongside a Customer Success Manager, and use what you learn on the front line to help shape product direction. This role isn't about selling or pitching. It's about deeply understanding engineering problems and solving them alongside the customer.

We are looking for a candidate in Cincinatti to work regularly on-site with a local CoLab customer.

Our Ideal Candidate

You’re a mechanical engineer by trade and have worked as a designer in an A&D company. You also understand the full product development life cycle: how design, manufacturing, quality, and engineering leadership depend on each other, and where collaboration breaks down. You can coach those teams toward working together better.

You know how to improve that life cycle with technology. Maybe you’ve championed internal tools or created automation or scripts.

You also know a process that makes sense on paper won’t get adopted on its own. You can meet people where they are, including the stakeholders who don’t want to change.

You don’t need to be the loudest voice in the room, but you can run a sprint and lead a cross-functional project. If the average person might find this job too undefined or complex, that probably excites you.

Job Responsibilities

• Mapping a customer's current-state design review and engineering workflows, and defining the target-state process their teams will actually adopt.
• Deploying and tuning CoLab's AI capabilities against a customer's own standards, drawing checklists, and design guidelines, and diagnosing what's working and what isn't.
• Providing mechanical engineering expertise to validate AI-generated results and ensure engineering rigor.
• Investigating and solving complex engineering data and integration challenges across PLM, ERP, QMS, and traditional design feedback tools.
• Expanding adoption into new teams, programs, and sites within the account, partnering with the Customer Success Manager on where the next opportunity sits.
• Collaborating with product teams to identify feature gaps, improve capabilities, and refine AutoReview.

Qualifications

Must-haves:

• Background in mechanical design engineering, ideally in a medium- to large-sized organization.
• Strong understanding of PLM & ERP systems and enterprise engineering data architecture.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical projects and cross-functional collaborations.
• Experience working directly with customers or internal stakeholders to solve technical problems.
• Comfort working in fast-changing, ambiguous environments.
• Strong written communication and documentation skills.
• Working knowledge of high-level AI architecture, specifically LLMs.
• Familiarity with APIs, data integrations, and enterprise architecture concepts.

Nice-to-haves:

• Experience with internal tool development, scripting, or automation.
• Exposure to AI/ML tools applied to engineering workflows.
• Prior work in design consulting or product development at scale.

Travel Expectations

While this is a fully remote role, travel is a consistent part of the job. There are two 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: This role will work closely with a local customer with expectations to be on site with that customer, so there will likely be far less travel than our typical MFDE roll. That being said, in the event the local customer were to no longer work with us, the following is our standard MFDE travel expectations: “For most of our large deployment customers, we will visit on-site during kick-off and key expansion opportunities. Most on-sites involve 2-3 days with the customer, with travel on either side. Travel is primarily within North America, and you can expect 4 customer on-sites per quarter.”

Extra Details

• This is a full-time, permanent position with a competitive compensation package that includes stock options.
• Unlimited paid vacation, extended health benefits, and 401k matching.

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.