Software Engineer, Agents

Benchling • San Francisco, CA

2d • Hybrid

About The Position

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.

Requirements

• 2+ years of professional software engineering experience, building and maintaining production systems.
• Experience across the stack, comfort working with backend systems (Python or similar languages) and modern frontend frameworks (React or equivalent).
• Strong product sense, with the ability to iterate quickly and refine solutions based on user feedback and data.
• Curiosity and excitement about LLMs and AI agents, and a desire to shape how they can transform scientific research.
• Collaborative mindset, able to work closely with engineers, product managers, and scientists to bring new ideas to life.
• Desire to work in a fast-paced environment, where priorities can shift and rapid experimentation is encouraged.
• Interest in learning about biotechnology (no prior knowledge required, just a willingness to learn and adapt).

Responsibilities

• Build end-to-end AI agents, prototyping and productionizing systems that automate scientific work, from experiment design to data analysis and reporting.
• Work directly with customers to ideate use cases, gather feedback, build evaluations, and onboard scientific teams.
• Engineer across the stack, from developing new LLM-powered primitives to shipping intuitive user interfaces inside Benchling’s applications.
• Continuously improve our agent platform, contributing to frameworks, tooling, and infrastructure that accelerate future agent development.
• Shape how we build AI at Benchling, driving experimentation, contributing to technical direction, and helping evolve our engineering and product development practices as the field matures.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 251-500 employees