engineering
Posted Feb 9Engineering Leader, Data Input
at Benchling
San Francisco, United StatesHybrid
Responsibilities
- In the near term, drive execution of foundational technical initiatives and API delivery that improve the performance, reliability, scalability, and extensibility of the team's platform, including identifying and prioritizing opportunities for AI-powered features as the platform matures.
Requirements
- We are rebuilding biotech for the AI era.
- 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.
- experience of scientists working in the lab as well as the ability of other software developers to integrate the components we create into their applications.
- Increasingly, our work involves developing AI-powered features that make data entry faster, more accurate, and more intelligent.
- The team is currently focused on enhancing the core capabilities of the platform that Benchling's most important applications are built on — investing in foundational re-architecture, performance, and scalability work that will unlock new APIs, AI-powered features, and future product capabilities.
- experience as a technical lead on projects that involve multiple engineers across multiple quarters. -
- Experience building cloud-based web applications, ideally on both the front- and back-end. -
- Experience leading teams through technically complex, long-running platform or infrastructure projects — such as large-scale refactors, backend migrations, or re-architecting core systems — where correctness, performance, and scalability matter more than speed of feature delivery. - Grown high-trajectory, early-to-mid-career engineers into leaders with company-wide impact. -
- - Interest in and ability to develop AI-powered product features, including integrating LLMs and AI capabilities into scientific software workflows.
- - Familiarity with software engineering management productivity tools (e.g., Jira or other bug database), as well as observability tools for logging, metrics, and alerting.
- experience with biotech, pharmaceutical, or other life sciences business sectors or education is not required, but is absolutely a plus.
- NICE-TO-HAVE - Frontend development experience, especially with React and TypeScript. - Python programming experience. -
- Experience building both customer-facing features and developer platform / reusable component libraries. -
- Experience designing and delivering customer-facing APIs, particularly in a product where the API must coexist with a rich UI. -
- Experience with performance optimization, particularly moving computation from client to server and managing the performance implications of that transition. -
- Experience in enterprise B2B SaaS, particularly in regulated industries. -
- Experience solving challenging performance problems for large-scale web applications.
Experience
- QUALIFICATIONS - 2+ years of
- experience as an engineering manager. - 5+ years of
Benefits
- We are an equal opportunity employer.
Additional details
- Getting a molecule from discovery to patients, or a crop from lab to field, involves thousands of slow, manual, disconnected steps.
- 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 Benchling is on a mission to accelerate the pace of life sciences research and development.
- To do that, we build a suite of tools that scientists use daily to solve humanity's most pressing problems.
- The tools we build must be optimized to make scientists more efficient in their work, across a broad spectrum of research, development, and manufacturing tasks.
- The Data Input team builds a platform and user experiences to help scientists and lab operators more efficiently capture and work with their data.
- The team develops structured tables, forms, and data entry tooling that enables scientists to input, transform, and propagate their laboratory data downstream.
- The Data Input team owns components that over 90% of Benchling customers use, and is a key contributor to initiatives with company-wide impact.
- This is technically complex work that requires careful sequencing and an eye toward long-term payoff.
- This role is ideal for managers who are energized by deep technical work, who have a track record of leading teams through large-scale refactors and platform migrations, and who find satisfaction in building the foundations that directly enable customer-facing wins.