Engineering Leader, Data Input

Benchling•San Francisco, CA

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

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 Data Input team comes in. The Data Input 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 Data Input 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.

Requirements

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 Haves

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.

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.

Benefits

Competitive total rewards package
Broad range of medical, dental, and vision plans for employees and their dependents
Fertility healthcare and family-forming benefits
Four months of fully paid parental leave
401(k) + Employer Match
Commuter benefits for in-office employees and a generous home office set up stipend for remote employees
Mental health benefits, including therapy and coaching, for employees and their dependents
Monthly Wellness stipend
Learning and development stipend
Generous and flexible vacation
Company-wide Winter holiday shutdown
Sabbaticals for 5-year and 10-year anniversaries