At CoLab, we help mechanical engineering teams bring life-changing products to market years sooner. Our product, CoLab, is the world’s first Design Engagement System (DES) - a category defining product that Engineering teams use to engage in meaningful, productive design conversations, catch preventable mistakes, and get to market faster. Our customers include the largest engineering organizations in the world such as Ford, Johnson Controls, Komatsu, and Polaris in the industrial equipment, consumer products, automotive, aerospace & defense, and shipbuilding industries.
About this role
We're hiring our first Implementation Specialist to own onboarding delivery for CoLab's customers, ensuring teams are confident and capable when they go live. Your work is foundational to ensuring they engage, expand, and become long-time CoLab advocates.
You'll guide customers from signed deal to early adoption: configuring their environments, training users, and navigating the organizational change that comes with shifting how engineering teams collaborate. You'll partner closely with Customer Success Managers who own the long-term customer relationship, Customer Success Engineers who handle deep technical and workflow troubleshooting, Customer Education who builds the scalable learning content and Academy infrastructure, and Product who builds the in-product onboarding experience. Together, you'll make sure every customer is set up to realize real value with CoLab.
In your role you are focused on hands-on delivery. You'll work together closely with Customer Education, whose role is scalable enablement. Your pattern recognition from live implementations informs what education content gets built, and the resources they create make your implementations more efficient and consistent over time. As the onboarding function matures, the line between "what gets delivered 1:1" and "what gets delivered through self-serve education" will evolve, and you'll help define that together.
You'll also be building the onboarding function itself — the playbooks, processes, and infrastructure that make what works for one customer repeatable and scalable across many. If you're energized by the combination of hands-on customer delivery and the chance to architect how a growing company onboards, this is the role.
What You'll Do
Guide customers from contract to confident adoption
- Partner with the CSM to run a seamless transition from sales — aligning on customer goals, success criteria, and any context from the deal cycle that shapes how onboarding should be structured
- Lead kickoff calls, training sessions, and launch coordination, tailoring the approach to each customer's specific use cases (design review, supplier collaboration, internal reviews)
- Configure customer environments: integrations, SSO, workspace setup, user permissions
- Define and track onboarding milestones with clear timelines, holding customers accountable to launch goals while keeping the CSM looped in on progress and risks
- Ensure customers hit their first value milestone — not just "go live" but demonstrably using CoLab in their workflows
Connect customers to CoLab Academy resources and self-serve learning paths that reinforce what's covered in live training and support continued adoption after the implementation engagement wraps
Navigate complex enterprise deployments
- Support large-scale rollouts (100+ users, multi-site deployments, global teams), adapting the onboarding approach based on customer complexity, readiness, and organizational dynamics
- Navigate multi-stakeholder environments — champion identification, executive alignment, and managing competing priorities across engineering, IT, and procurement teams
- Partner with customer IT teams on integration requirements (PLM systems like Windchill, Teamcenter, or Enovia; SSO; data migration)
- Apply change management principles to help engineering teams adopt new ways of collaborating — recognizing that getting people to change entrenched workflows is as important as the technical setup
Build the onboarding function
- Create repeatable playbooks, templates, and processes based on patterns across customer implementations
- Document best practices, training methodologies, and configuration guides
- Identify opportunities to scale: where can we automate, where do customers consistently struggle, where should live delivery shift to self-serve education?
- Partner with Customer Education to ensure implementation learnings flow into scalable content — the friction you see in live deployments should directly shape what gets built in CoLab Academy
- Partner with Product and Customer Success to improve the end-to-end onboarding experience — feeding customer insights into product roadmap decisions and in-app guidance
Support AI and emerging use cases
- Help customers prepare for AI-powered features: governance requirements, data readiness, workflow design
- Guide customers through technical requirements unique to new capabilities and their deployment context
- Serve as the voice of customer onboarding needs back to Product and Engineering, translating real-world implementation friction into actionable product feedback
What We're Looking For
Must-haves:
- 2+ years in technical implementation, onboarding, customer training, or solutions engineering (SaaS preferred)
- Technically strong — engineering background or equivalent comfort with integrations, workflows, and technical troubleshooting
- Proven ability to train and enable users on complex technical products\
- Business acumen alongside technical depth — you can speak to an engineering director about review cycle efficiency and you can walk an admin through SSO configuration
- Experience managing enterprise deployments or large-scale rollouts
- Strong communication skills — can explain technical concepts clearly to both engineers and executives
- Self-directed and organized — you'll be building this function with autonomy
- Collaborative by default — you thrive in environments where success is shared, context flows freely, and you're expected to work across team boundaries every day
Nice-to-haves:
- Experience with PLM systems (Windchill, Teamcenter, Enovia), CAD tools (CATIA, NX, Creo, SolidWorks), or engineering collaboration platforms
- Background in manufacturing, aerospace, automotive, or industrial design industries
- Previous customer-facing role at a technical B2B SaaS company
- Experience building onboarding programs or training curriculum from scratch
- Prior experience organizing and managing project deliverables and timelines
