Engineering Leader, Notebook

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.

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. Feel free to reference any tools, platforms, or workflows you use today.

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. This is where the Notebook team comes in.

The Notebook 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. We focus on both the user 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 Notebook team owns components that over 90% of Benchling customers use, and is a key contributor to initiatives with company-wide impact. 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. 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. 

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Recruit, develop, and lead a team of exceptional software engineers.

• Partner closely with product and design to define roadmap and long-term product strategy. 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.

• Hold an unreasonably high bar for product quality as the team executes its work.

• Partner closely with engineers on the team to ensure excellent technical decisions as you lay the foundations for new products and extend mature ones. Directly perform code reviews and engage with the team's codebase.

• Meet with customers to understand their science and what they need from Benchling, particularly around data entry workflows in research, development, and manufacturing contexts.

• Translate strategy into execution by developing and executing quarterly plans with clear metrics and targets.

• Contribute to engineering-wide organizational improvements as part of the management team.

QUALIFICATIONS

• 2+ years of experience as an engineering manager.

• 5+ years of experience as a software engineer, with 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.

• Experience (and enjoy!) working directly with customers to inform your team's roadmap.

• A track record of working with cross-functional partners in product, design, sales, and marketing.

• Comfort with and enthusiasm for hands-on technical leadership: you should be excited to write and review code, and view reviewing your engineers' code as an essential part of the job.

• Interest in and ability to develop AI-powered product features, including integrating LLMs and AI capabilities into scientific software workflows.

• A track record of working with cross-functional partners in product, design, sales, and marketing.

• Familiarity with software engineering management productivity tools (e.g., Jira or other bug database), as well as observability tools for logging, metrics, and alerting.

• Interest in / curiosity about biotech! Prior 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.

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 (Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday).

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Benchling welcomes everyone.

We believe diversity enriches our team so we hire people with a wide range of identities, backgrounds, and experiences.

We are an equal opportunity employer. That means we don’t discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. We also consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law, including but not limited to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.