Engineering Leader, Admin & Identity Platform

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.

The Admin & Identity Platform team is one of the most foundational engineering teams at Benchling. Every user who logs in, every permission check on every piece of data, and every rule that governs how science is captured flows through systems this team owns. The team's mission is to keep Benchling secure, configurable, and auditable, while ensuring that every other engineering team at Benchling can build on top of our identity and permissions infrastructure with confidence.

As the engineering leader for this team, you will lead a group of engineers responsible for Benchling's core authentication and authorization systems, our permissions framework, identity management (SSO, SAML, service principals), validation rules, notifications, and application configuration. This is foundational platform work, the systems you own are deeply embedded across every part of the product, and the decisions you and the team will make have real security, compliance, and reliability implications for Benchling's largest enterprise customers.

The role sits at an interesting intersection of platform reliability and forward-looking product development. In the near term, the team is driving Delegated Auth to general availability, an OAuth 2.0 Authorization Code flow that enables third-party apps and AI agents to securely act on behalf of users. This is foundational to Benchling's MCP and developer ecosystem strategy. Longer term, the team is expanding granular permissions, building folder-level access control, and continuing to evolve Benchling's identity architecture to keep pace with what regulated enterprise environments require.

This is a good fit for an engineering leader who is energized by high-stakes security and platform work, who earns the trust of strong senior engineers through genuine technical engagement, and who can hold both things at once: keeping critical shared infrastructure running well while also shipping meaningful new capabilities. You will work closely with security, product, and developer platform teams, and the work you do will directly shape how safely and effectively Benchling's customers and Benchling's own engineers interact with the platform.
 

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

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

• Define and execute on a roadmap that encompasses new product development, quality improvements, and software maintenance activities. Partner closely with product management and design to define short- and long-term product strategy.

• Hold an unreasonably high bar for product quality as the teams execute their work.

• Partner closely with engineers to ensure that we make excellent technical decisions as we lay the foundations for new products and a scalable platform.

• Meet with customers to understand their science & what they need from Benchling.

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

• 4+ 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

• Track record of growing high-trajectory, early-to-mid-career engineers into leaders with company-wide impact.

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

• Experience owning or operating security-sensitive systems, particularly around authentication, authorization, or identity management.

• Experience building shared platform or infrastructure teams that serve internal engineering customers in addition to external users.

• 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.

• Willing to work on-site in our San Francisco office three days a week.

• [Strong Plus] Familiarity with OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, SAML, or other industry-standard auth protocols. 

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.