Software Engineer, Tools and Automation

Role details

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 Biotechnology is rewriting life as we know it, from the medicines we take, to the crops we grow, the materials we wear, and the household goods that we rely on every day. But moving at the new speed of science requires better technology. Benchling's mission is to unlock the power of biotechnology. The world's most innovative biotech companies use Benchling's R&D Cloud to power the development of breakthrough products and accelerate time to milestone and market. Come help us bring modern software to modern science. Benchling is building AI & Data Engineering, a small autonomous team within our Security & IT organization. We own two things: the internal AI capabilities and adoption so Benchlings can rapidly experiment and discover what works; and the source-of-truth data & analytics infrastructure the company depends on. We span the bridge between departmental AI experimentation and enterprise-grade agentic systems in production — rapidly prototyping new solutions, and graduating proven prototypes into hardened, well-governed systems with full SDLC rigor. This is an internal tools and automation role - think of it as an internal forward-deployed engineer. You will sit with the teams whose work you are automating, scope the problem with them directly, and ship the system that fixes it. AI is what we are supporting, but not directly what we build: we want someone who builds reliable internal systems and integrations, and who reaches for a model when a model is genuinely the right answer. Model research or ML engineering experience is neither required nor the bar. We're built to be enablers. We set the patterns, standards, and shared infrastructure that let departmental teams and AI power users across the company build their own solutions, and we take on the agentic systems that no single team owns. It's early days for enterprise agentic AI at Benchling, and we'll be moving fast — iterating on prototypes, learning from internal customers, and changing direction as the field matures. As the founding engineer for this team, you'll own the technical direction, architecture, and delivery of our internal tooling and automation portfolio. You'll be a player-coach — hands-on most of the time, leading by doing — and partner closely with our AI Product Manager on prioritization and our Data Analytics & Science team peers on the data foundations that agentic systems depend on. This is an individual contributor role on a flat team: you'll lead the engineering team in ideation, planning, and delivery and you'll drive technical hiring, while people management responsibilities sit with the hiring manager. Check out our engineering blog for examples of past work across Benchling. 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. Where a workflow genuinely calls for an agent, own that architecture too: tool integration, state management, and evaluation. Make clear build vs. buy decisions across the stack with documented rationale. - 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. Graduate departmental prototypes into hardened, production-grade systems and own production support under a "you build it, you run it" model. - 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. Partner with Security Engineering on threat modeling for the systems you build - including the agentic ones, where prompt injection, tool misuse, and data exfiltration are live concerns. - 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. Sit down with department leaders and non-technical stakeholders, turn a vague "this process is painful" into a scoped and prioritized engineering problem, and drive it to