Software Forward Deployed Engineer - Cincinnati

CoLab Software•Cincinnati, OH

8d•Onsite

About The Position

CoLab is hiring a Software Forward Deployed Engineer to embed with strategic customers and deliver high-impact, technically complex projects. The role involves scoping, building, and deploying integrations, product features, and AI product features that connect customer systems to CoLab, accelerate adoption, and increase customer return on investment. The engineer owns delivery of key customer initiatives and works with customer success, product, design, engineering, and leadership stakeholders to remove blockers and achieve results. Unlike a traditional software development role, this position involves significant ambiguity, external team dynamics, and timeline pressure. The successful candidate will work directly with customers and ship code to solve complex user problems with substantial agency and autonomy. The position is based on site with customers in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Requirements

Be based in Cincinnati and be comfortable working on site with customers.
Have delivered complex technical solutions on projects where requirements were not clearly defined.
Write clean, production-grade code in a variety of languages and be language agnostic.
Be comfortable working in unfamiliar technical and organizational environments.
Have experience with enterprise systems such as data lakes, identity providers, PLM, or ERP.
Be able to break down ambiguity, sequence work, and adjust scope while maintaining momentum.
Be confident leading deeply technical conversations with customer engineering or IT teams.
Focus on delivering outcomes, not just writing code.
Have a “go figure it out” mindset and be able to adapt when circumstances change.

Nice To Haves

Prior experience embedding within customer environments for 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.

Responsibilities

Own strategic customer projects from technical discovery through 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 control solutions, and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions.
Set up CoLab integrations and organize incoming data for use in features such as AutoReview and Operator.
Work directly with customers to understand needs, propose solutions, and guide adoption.
Develop solutions for specific customer requirements while considering the broader customer base, and share customer requirements with the development team.