Agentic AI Engineer

Benchling

3d • $176,000 - $265,000 • Remote

About The Position

Benchling is seeking an Agentic AI Engineer to join their Intelligence Engineering & Enablement team. This role is crucial for building the company's internal AI capabilities and enabling the broader organization to leverage AI effectively. The team focuses on internal AI tooling, adoption, and AI-assisted workflows, as well as cross-functional agentic AI applications. They act as a bridge between departmental AI experimentation and enterprise-grade agentic systems, rapidly prototyping and deploying solutions. As the founding engineer, you will own the technical direction, architecture, and delivery of the agentic AI portfolio, acting as a player-coach, hands-on with coding, and partnering with product management and data teams. This is a senior individual contributor role focused on technical leadership and driving the team's engineering efforts.

Requirements

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience building production systems, with strong systems design fundamentals.
• Hands-on experience building production systems that integrate with LLMs and/or agentic patterns: orchestration, tool use, memory and state management, evaluation, and observability.
• Demonstrated understanding of how to optimize workloads across deterministic and non-deterministic capabilities, striking the right architectural balance for the needs of the specific solution being implemented.
• Production experience with at least two of: Python, TypeScript/Node.js, Go; comfort with working across the stack.
• Hands-on expertise with LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic), agentic frameworks (LangChain, CrewAI), RAG over business content (Confluence, contracts, policies), vector databases (pgvector, Pinecone), workflow automation (n8n, Langflow), and LLM observability and evaluation tooling (LangSmith, Arize).
• Track record of going from zero to one: a platform, function, or product area you built up from scratch and scaled.
• Experience operating in regulated or security-sensitive environments.
• Solid grasp of enterprise security fundamentals — encryption, access controls, audit logging, secrets management.
• Comfortable exercising technical leadership independent of positional authority.
• Build software with a product-first approach.
• Enjoy ownership and building key pieces of platforms.
• Strong communication skills with both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Interest in learning more about life science (prior knowledge is not required).

Nice To Haves

• Background in enterprise SaaS, life sciences, or biotech.
• Familiarity with LLM orchestration patterns and frameworks (LangGraph, MCP, agent SDKs from major model providers).
• Experience with async orchestration (Temporal, Prefect, Airflow) applied to long-running or agentic workflows.
• Familiarity with SOC 2, HIPAA, or GxP compliance as they apply to AI systems.
• Experience building internal developer platforms or internal tools at scale.
• Direct experience coaching or enabling non-engineers (analysts, ops staff, business power users) to build with AI tooling.

Responsibilities

• Define the foundational architecture for enterprise agentic AI at Benchling, including orchestration, agent frameworks, tool integrations, memory and state management, evaluation, and observability.
• Make clear build vs. buy decisions across the stack with documented rationale.
• Write production code at least half your time, particularly during the team's first year.
• Stand up the CI/CD, testing, evaluation, and deployment infrastructure for agentic systems, leveraging existing patterns from Benchling's Build organization.
• Graduate prototypes into hardened, production-grade systems and own production support under a "you build it, you run it" model.
• 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 agentic architectures.
• Coach power users and departmental teams on production patterns.
• Develop criteria for graduating prototypes into enterprise-grade systems.
• Build internal-facing developer experience, including templates, SDKs, and sandboxes.
• Work closely with Data, Analytics & Systems team peers on source-of-truth datasets and pipelines.
• Engage with department leaders on workflow transformations.
• Partner with platform and infrastructure teams to leverage existing capabilities.
• Set the bar for code quality, testing and evaluation, documentation, and on-call practices.
• Drive technical hiring through interview loop design and bar-raising.
• Mentor engineers on the team and other AI builders across the company.

Benefits

• 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.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed