Description
We are rebuilding biotech for the AI era. 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.
The Support Team Leader will lead our customer support presence in close collaboration with our Global Support Leadership Team and our CX Leadership Team. This role combines growing a high-performing regional support team, owning incident management leadership, and helping scale a modern, efficient Support organization through Enterprise-grade practices and thoughtful AI adoption.
Responsibilities:
- Manage the daily support operations, including strategic resourcing and staffing, and serve as a first-line contact for regional escalations, while deeply understanding scientist pain points.
- Build team culture and identity: run regular team meetings, celebrate wins and milestones, invest in career growth conversations, and develop a team where people feel supported and excited to grow.
- Partner with the Incident Center of Excellence (CoE) to mature the incident process (post-incident reviews, closing CoE action items, formalizing communication playbooks and severity-based response criteria), and help build and run a sustainable off-hours coverage model – recruiting, training, and personally rotating in as an escalation responder.
- Analyze incident and support metrics (volume, severity trends, time-to-resolution, comms timeliness) to inform staffing and process decisions, and report trends to CX leadership.
- Drive consistent, effective adoption of AI tools across support workflows, piloting opportunities to reduce ticket-handling time, surface account context automatically, and free up Product Support Analyst time for higher-value work.
- Collaborate with Build, Product, Technical Account Managers, Customer Success, and Professional Services to coordinate on customer issues and incidents, and ensure the team keeps help content and product knowledge current.
- Represent support at customer-facing events as needed (customer visits, bootcamps, Benchtalk, conferences).
Qualifications:
- Experienced leader with a track record of building and developing a team, with 2+ years management experience and 5+ years SaaS support or professional services – or demonstrated leadership, with experience assigning ticket work and managing queues and resources.
- Working knowledge of support and incident tooling and industry best practices for world class customer service in technical support/services environment (e.g. Salesforce, Zendesk, JIRA, PagerDuty, or equivalent incident and support systems).
- Coaches with empathy and exercises judgment prioritizing issues by urgency, severity, and customer health context.
- Skilled in, or has strong aptitude for, customer-facing crisis communication: knowing what to say, when, and to whom during a live incident, and how to translate technical root cause into clear customer-facing narratives (RCAs/ISNs).
- Experience with Enterprise-grade support: managing high-stakes accounts holistically, building trust with sophisticated customers, and thinking beyond individual ticket resolution.
- Genuine enthusiasm for using AI in support, ideally with hands-on experience piloting or driving adoption.
- Bachelor's degree in a life sciences related field is recommended (biology, microbiology, genetics, biotechnology, neurology, etc.) - direct research or lab experience is a big plus.
- Strong communicator and customer advocate – empathetic, resourceful, and detail-oriented, with excellent written and verbal skills across departments, remote teams, and external stakeholders. Comfortable working independently, adapting quickly to new demands, and solving complex problems with a strong sense of urgency and bias toward action.
Compensation:
- $127K – $150K • Offers Equity
Full-time U.S. employees enjoy a comprehensive benefits program including equity, health, dental, vision, 401(k)+ employer match, wellness, commuter, and more.