Senior Back End Developer

CoLab Software

11d•Hybrid

About The Position

We're looking for a Senior Backend Developer to join our Build Operator team. Operator isn't a chatbot bolted onto our product. It's becoming the intelligence layer across CoLab, helping engineering teams search company knowledge, surface design decisions, answer complex questions, and generate insights from years of engineering work. You'll join the team responsible for the backend systems that make this possible. That means building scalable retrieval pipelines, evolving our AI search infrastructure, integrating structured and unstructured engineering data, and developing the services that power intelligent experiences across the platform. Over the next year, Operator will expand well beyond conversational search. You'll help build capabilities like company-wide knowledge retrieval, dynamic reporting, AI-generated dashboards, and personalized engineering insights that become embedded throughout CoLab. This is a role for someone who enjoys solving deep backend problems. You'll spend far more time thinking about data architecture, search quality, retrieval systems, and scalable services than building user interfaces. The work is complex and often ambiguous. This role exists because there often isn’t an existing pattern to follow.

Requirements

7+ years building production backend software
Strong experience with Python and modern backend development
Experience building APIs, distributed systems, and cloud-native applications
Strong understanding of databases, system architecture, and scalable backend design
Experience working with structured and unstructured data
Comfortable making architectural decisions in evolving product environments
Excellent communication skills with both technical and non-technical teammates

Nice To Haves

Experience building AI-powered applications or LLM workflows
Experience with retrieval systems, semantic search, or RAG architectures
Experience with vector databases or search infrastructure (TurboPuffer experience is a plus)
Experience with embeddings, ranking, or information retrieval
Experience with event-driven architectures
Experience building enterprise SaaS platforms

Responsibilities

Design and build the backend services that power Operator
Develop scalable retrieval systems that connect engineering knowledge across design reviews, notebooks, search, and other product surfaces
Build APIs and services that enable AI-powered experiences throughout the platform
Improve search quality, data pipelines, and knowledge retrieval performance
Expand Operator's capabilities to support intelligent reporting, dashboards, and engineering insights
Design systems that organize company knowledge across business units, engineering domains, and manufacturing processes
Collaborate closely with AI, Product, Design, and Engineering to deliver customer-facing capabilities
Improve reliability, observability, and performance across backend infrastructure
Mentor teammates through architecture discussions, code reviews, and technical leadership