Senior Software Engineer, Lab Informatics (Benchling)

Institute for Protein Innovation•Boston, MA

About The Position

The Institute for Protein Innovation (IPI) is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join its Lab Informatics team. This role will focus on architecting, building, and evolving the Institute’s digital laboratory platform, with Benchling as a core component. The engineer will collaborate with scientists, automation engineers, and data teams to translate scientific workflows into digital solutions. Responsibilities include Benchling configuration and development, scientific data modeling, application and integration development, laboratory automation, analytics, and platform architecture. The position is key to ensuring scientific data is structured, traceable, accessible, and reusable, while establishing strong software engineering practices for the laboratory informatics ecosystem. The role reports to the Director of Automation and Process Optimization.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Bioinformatics, Software Engineering, Computational Biology, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
5+ years of professional software engineering, scientific informatics, or related industry experience.
Hands-on experience developing on the Benchling platform, including Benchling Apps, App Canvas, APIs/SDK, Events, Insights, and/or Data Warehouse.
Strong Python and SQL development skills.
Experience developing production-quality applications, APIs, and system integrations.
Experience with REST APIs, webhooks/event-driven architectures, authentication/authorization, and structured data models.
Experience with Git, automated testing, code review, CI/CD, and modern software engineering practices.
Working knowledge of life-science R&D workflows and scientific data.
Demonstrated ability to translate complex scientific workflows into scalable software solutions and data models.
Excellent communication skills and ability to collaborate directly with scientists and technical stakeholders.

Nice To Haves

Experience configuring Benchling Registry, Inventory, Results, schemas, workflows, and notebook templates.
Experience integrating laboratory instruments or automation systems with informatics platforms.
Experience building scientific dashboards or analytics applications with Plotly/Dash, Streamlit, Tableau, Spotfire, or similar tools.
Experience in biologics, antibody discovery, protein science, molecular biology, cell engineering, or related life-science R&D.
Experience with cloud infrastructure and containerized application development.

Responsibilities

Partner with scientists and cross-functional teams to understand experimental workflows, gather requirements, and translate scientific needs into effective technical solutions.
Design, develop, and maintain the Institute’s Benchling environment, including schemas, Registry entities, Results, Inventory, workflows, notebook templates, applications, and other platform capabilities.
Develop production-quality applications and integrations using the Benchling Developer Platform, including APIs, SDKs, Apps, App Canvas, events/webhooks, and related technologies.
Design and maintain scalable scientific data models that support data integrity, traceability, interoperability, and long-term reuse.
Build scientific analytics, dashboards, and data applications using Benchling Insights, SQL, Python, and appropriate visualization and application frameworks.
Integrate Benchling with laboratory instruments, automation platforms, internal applications, data systems, and external scientific software.
Design and implement workflows that enable reliable transfer of experimental data between laboratory automation systems and Benchling.
Establish and follow software engineering best practices, including source control, code review, automated testing, CI/CD, documentation, deployment, monitoring, and maintainable software architecture.
Ensure consistent implementation of data standards and maintain high levels of data quality and integrity across the laboratory informatics platform.
Serve as a technical subject matter expert for Benchling, advising scientists and technical teams on platform architecture, data modeling, integrations, and development best practices.
Troubleshoot complex platform, application, and integration issues; identify root causes and implement durable, scalable solutions.
Contribute to the technical roadmap for laboratory informatics and evaluate new technologies and approaches that improve scientific productivity and data accessibility.
Develop technical documentation, user guidance, and training materials to support adoption of laboratory informatics tools.
Provide technical leadership through architecture discussions, code reviews, development standards, and mentorship of engineers and technical colleagues.