Description
We are rebuilding biotech for the AI era.
When a breakthrough is delayed, the world waits. Getting a molecule from discovery to patients, or a crop from lab to field, involves thousands of slow, manual, disconnected steps. AI has the potential to change this, compressing decades of R&D work into years. But that only happens when clean, structured scientific data and AI are built into how science gets done.
Benchling is the AI platform for biotech R&D. Scientists use Benchling to design experiments, capture structured data, and run AI agents and models directly in their workflows. Over 200,000 scientists around the world trust Benchling to power their most important work, from academic labs to Sanofi, Moderna, and more than half of the world's top 50 biopharma.
ROLE OVERVIEW
We’re building an AI scientist for our customers. We can’t do that if we haven’t built the muscle ourselves. AI fluency is the foundation we build on; it's core to how we work, and we're committed to helping every new hire integrate it into their day-to-day. As part of our interview process, you'll complete a brief AI-focused exercise or discussion so we can understand how you think about and use AI to drive impact in your role.
Responsibilities
- Shape technical direction and architecture: Define the foundational architecture for internal tooling and automation at Benchling - integration patterns across our SaaS estate, workflow orchestration, data access, service boundaries, and the observability that makes internal systems supportable.
- Build and ship the early portfolio yourself: Write production code at least half your time, particularly during the team's first year. Stand up the CI/CD, testing, and deployment infrastructure the team runs on - leveraging existing patterns from Benchling's Build organization wherever possible.
- Design for enterprise from day one: Build for multi-tenant isolation, secrets management, audit logging, payload encryption, role-based access controls, and human-in-the-loop controls calibrated to risk.
- Enable builders across the company: Coach power users and departmental teams on production patterns, develop the criteria that decide which prototypes graduate into enterprise-grade systems, and build the internal-facing developer experience , templates, SDKs, sandboxes , that lets builders outside this team ship safely.
- Partner across functions: Work closely with our data analytics peers on the source-of-truth datasets and pipelines that agentic systems depend on.
- Elevate engineering standards: Set the bar for code quality, testing and evaluation, documentation, and on-call practices.
Qualifications
- 7+ years of professional software engineering experience building production systems, with strong systems design and integration fundamentals.
- A track record of building internal tools, automation, and systems integrations that colleagues depended on daily.
- Demonstrated understanding of how to optimize workloads across deterministic and non-deterministic capabilities.
- Production experience with at least two of: Python, TypeScript/Node.js, Go.
- Practical experience applying LLMs where they earn their place in a workflow.
- Track record of going from zero to one: a platform, function, or product area you built up from scratch and scaled.
- Experience operating in regulated or security-sensitive environments.
- Comfortable exercising technical leadership independent of positional authority.
- Build software with a product-first approach.
- Enjoy ownership and building key pieces of platforms.
- Strong communication skills with non-technical audiences.
- Interest in learning more about life science.
Nice to Have
- Background in enterprise SaaS, life sciences, or biotech.
- Familiarity with LLM orchestration and tool-integration patterns.
- Experience with async orchestration.
- Familiarity with SOC 2, HIPAA, or GxP compliance.
- Experience building internal developer platforms or internal tools at scale.
- Direct experience coaching or enabling non-engineers.
- Model research or ML engineering.
How We Work
We offer a flexible hybrid work arrangement that prioritizes in-office collaboration. Employees are expected to be on-site 3 days per week.