Software Engineer, Backend (Infrastructure Engineering)

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 hiring a Software Engineer for our Infrastructure Engineering team to build and operate the platform that powers our product. You’ll have the opportunity to work across a broad range of infrastructure disciplines, including cloud infrastructure in AWS, our Kubernetes-based services platform, and the observability and operational tooling that keeps systems reliable. This role is highly collaborative: you’ll partner closely with product engineering teams to understand their needs and improve the developer experience across Benchling.

We’re looking for a strong early-career engineer with solid fundamentals and a growth mindset, someone excited to learn, contribute across a wide surface area, and take ownership over time. Benchling operates in a regulated environment, so you’ll help build systems with reliability, security, and auditability in mind.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Build, maintain, and improve foundational infrastructure and platform services used by product engineering teams.

• Partner directly with product teams to define requirements, design paved paths, and reduce friction in deploying and operating services.

• Contribute to our Kubernetes-based platform (e.g., Kubernetes, Istio), including service configuration, traffic management, and platform tooling.

• Develop and operate AWS infrastructure and automation (e.g., EKS/ECS, RDS, VPC, EC2, S3), with an emphasis on scalability, cost-awareness, and resiliency.

• Strengthen observability and operational readiness through metrics, logs, tracing, dashboards, and alerting (e.g., Datadog, Sentry, FireHydrant, Sentry, or similar).

• Participate in an on-call rotation, respond to incidents, and drive follow-up improvements to prevent recurrence (automation, hardening, better tooling).

• Write clear technical documentation and contribute to design discussions and reviews; improve systems incrementally with a focus on maintainability and reliability.

• Help ensure infrastructure meets expectations for operating in a regulated environment (e.g., change management, access controls, auditability) when applicable.

QUALIFICATIONS

• 2+ years of experience in software engineering.

• Build software with a product-first approach. You ship code quickly and care about the real world impact of your code.

• Have strong abilities in problem solving and iterating on feedback.

• Enjoy ownership and building key pieces of product, while collaborating with other teams.

• Clear and effective communicator, especially in cross functional settings.

• Are interested in learning more about life science (prior knowledge is not required; desire to learn is a must).

• Willing to work onsite in our SF office 3 days a week.

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.