Senior Director, Brand Marketing

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

CoLab is hiring a Senior Director of Brand Marketing to lead brand design, multimedia, brand content, and communications. This is a team leadership role, with an existing team of 6. You will also build two competencies we don’t have today: executive communications and integrated brand campaigns. 

If you are a passionate operator with insanely high standards, this is an opportunity to build an organization you can be proud of  — with a clear philosophy, operating model, creative process, and reputation inside CoLab.

This is your chance to make technical ideas feel consequential: to take something complex and create work that makes people understand why it matters and want to be part of the future it represents.

Our Ideal Candidate

You have a brand worldview. You don’t just know the mechanics of brand; you have beliefs about what makes one distinctive, memorable, and worth caring about.

You have taste backed by conviction. You push the work further. You might watch a video six times before finally realizing the first five seconds are wrong, then sit with the producer until you figure out what will make them right.

The details of the brand should be more top-of-mind for you than they are for our CEO or CMO. For some people, that sounds exhausting. For you, it’s probably your natural operating mode.

You know how to win support for your ideas. You can walk into a room where an ambitious creative idea feels too big, make the strategic case for it, and get executives excited to take the bet.

Job Responsibilities

Build the brand function and protect the standard

• Shape CoLab’s brand function across design, multimedia, brand content, communications, and campaigns.
• Establish the standards, operating model, and creative processes that enable exceptional work without turning the team into an internal creative-services desk.
• Own how the brand shows up across every touchpoint and develop principles that make the brand easier to recognize and harder to forget
• Stay close enough to the work to know when something is almost right but not right and help the team make it better.

Create memorable campaigns that make technical ideas feel consequential

• Partner with Product Marketing to identify the ideas CoLab should amplify, then turn them into bold, integrated campaigns.
• Make complex ideas in AI, engineering, and manufacturing understandable, compelling, and worth remembering.
• Push beyond safe creative when the strategy warrants it, and build the internal support required to take bigger bets.

Build an executive communications platform

• Own a cohesive communications strategy for our CEO, CTO, and Chief Strategy Officer across earned media, bylines, social, conferences, and CoLab events.
• Identify the ideas each executive can credibly own and create opportunities for them to contribute meaningfully to relevant conversations.
• Oversee media relations, press releases, executive visibility, and proactive communications opportunities.

Develop an exceptional team

• Lead and develop a multidisciplinary team spanning brand design, multimedia, content, and communications.
• Give clear feedback, create shared context, and help talented specialists do the best work of their careers.
• Identify where new talent, agencies, or partners can materially raise the standard of the function.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience across brand marketing, creative strategy, communications, design, or related disciplines, including meaningful ownership of a brand or creative function.
• A body of work that demonstrates taste backed by conviction: distinctive judgment, unusually high standards, and the ability to explain why something works or doesn’t.
• Experience leading multidisciplinary teams across several of the following: design, video, content, communications, production, and campaigns.
• Exceptional executive communication skills. You can challenge an idea, advocate for a bigger one, and earn trust because your point of view is grounded in strategy.
• The ability to move comfortably between setting direction and getting close to the work. You care about the big idea and the five-second edit.
• Experience making complex or technical subject matter (B2B software, AI, engineering, manufacturing, or another technically complex category) compelling without oversimplifying it.