Senior Product Designer

Senior Product Designer

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 Canadian company to watch by The Globe and Mail and Financial Post.

About the Role

This isn't just a design role—it's a leadership role within our UX design org. As a UX Designer, you'll be an integral design contributor across our various Build Teams. You'll be responsible for many of the most technically demanding and strategically critical areas of the product.

You'll go deep on complex workflows, integrations, and system interfaces. Your work will shape how our largest customers interact with CoLab—and set the foundation for how we scale our product across global organizations.

You'll collaborate with PMs and engineering leads across multiple teams, guiding design direction, aligning experiences across product areas, and making sure our platform is both powerful and intuitive. You'll also mentor other designers and help drive cross-functional thinking about UX quality, design systems, and product cohesion.

You'll help teams navigate ambiguity, bringing clarity to complex problem spaces where customer needs, technical constraints, and business goals aren't yet fully defined.

This role is perfect for someone who thrives on ambiguity, sees complexity as a design opportunity, and is ready to influence product strategy at the highest level.

Our Ideal Candidate

You've led design in enterprise SaaS products before—ideally in complex platform or admin experiences—and you're energized by systems, scalability, and hard-to-crack UX problems. You ask tough questions, uncover edge cases before they become issues, and bring clarity to dense problem spaces.

You don't just ship pixels—you shape product thinking. You're comfortable driving alignment across disciplines, managing trade-offs, and advocating for both users and long-term design quality. You're also a generous collaborator who values feedback and believes the best ideas come from sharp minds working together.

• You care deeply about understanding users and the environments they work in. You know that the best enterprise software isn't just powerful—it feels intuitive, trustworthy, and surprisingly simple despite the complexity underneath.
• You have a genuine curiosity about how engineers, reviewers, managers, and other stakeholders make decisions, and you use that understanding to create products that fit naturally into their workflows.
• You sweat the details. You care about interaction quality, information architecture, and product polish, and you're not satisfied when something merely works—you want it to feel great to use.
• You're proactive by nature, bringing opportunities and ideas we haven't identified yet and backing them up with customer understanding, product thinking, and strong design rationale.

This role is best suited to designers who enjoy systems, workflows, and complex problem spaces. If you're energized by simplifying difficult tasks, designing for scale, and making powerful products feel intuitive, you'll thrive here.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to design for CoLab's platform Partner with product and engineering leads to shape roadmap and architecture decisions
• Translate complex requirements into clear, usable, and scalable design solutions
• Elevate design quality across the product by contributing to shared patterns and systems
• Mentor other designers and elevate UX thinking across the org
• Plan and conduct customer interviews, workflow discovery, usability testing, prototype validation, and other research activities that inform product direction and design decisions
• Drive alignment and clarity in a space with technical complexity and organizational risk
• Help teams discover the right problem before designing the right solution
• Bring customer evidence into product discussions, helping teams make better decisions with greater confidence

What You'll Need

• 6+ years of product or UX design experience, with at least 4 in enterprise SaaS
• Deep experience designing complex systems, admin tools, or enterprise platform features
• Strong UX architecture skills and systems thinking; you design for scale and change
• Fluency in Figma and structured design systems
• Excellent communication and collaboration with technical partners
• Experience working closely with or designing for enterprise IT, security, or PLM/ERP systems
• Experience conducting customer discovery, usability testing, or validation research throughout the product development process
• Ability to navigate ambiguity and independently drive complex initiatives from problem definition through execution

Nice to Have

• Experience designing products for engineering, manufacturing, industrial, construction, or other highly technical domains
• Experience working directly with subject matter experts in complex operational environments
• Bonus: Familiarity with AI-enhanced design tools (e.g., Figma Make, Lovable, Galileo AI)

Extra Details

Compensation: This is a full-time, permanent position with an attractive compensation package that includes stock options.

Benefits: Extended health and benefits package, unlimited paid vacation, and 5% RRSP matching.

Remote/Hybrid: We have a physical office based in St. John's, NL, with flexibility to work hybrid or fully remote from anywhere in Canada.

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.