Software Engineer, Cloud Infrastructure
About The Position
As a software engineer on Benchling's Infrastructure team, you will design, build, and operate platforms, services, and tooling that enable Benchling engineering teams to ship and run software reliably, securely, and cost-effectively. The work spans the foundations of the AWS environment, including compute (Kubernetes/EKS), networking, secrets and identity, observability, infrastructure-as-code, and the economics of operating these systems at scale. You will independently scope and own meaningful, multi-quarter platform projects end to end, from an ambiguous starting point through production rollout and operational handoff. You will build paved roads that make secure, reliable, and efficient infrastructure practices the default for engineers across Benchling. The role also involves making architectural decisions, aligning teams, operating production systems, and improving tooling and engineering processes. Benchling is an AI platform for biotech R&D, used by more than 200,000 scientists worldwide. AI fluency is a core part of how the company works; candidates will complete a brief AI-focused exercise or discussion during the interview process.
Requirements
- At least 8 years of experience in software engineering, site reliability, platform, or infrastructure engineering.
- Strong software engineering fundamentals, including coding, testing, debugging, API design, and system design.
- Proficiency in at least one general-purpose programming language such as Python, Go, or TypeScript.
- Hands-on experience with AWS, such as EC2, EKS, RDS, VPC, IAM, or S3, and understanding of how compute, storage, networking, and security fit together.
- Production experience with infrastructure-as-code, ideally Terraform at meaningful scale.
- Working knowledge of Kubernetes and container-based platforms.
- Track record of independently scoping and delivering complex, ambiguous, multi-month projects from proposal to production, including writing technical design documents and communicating tradeoffs to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Experience making architectural decisions that other engineers and teams build on, and driving alignment across multiple teams.
- Comfort working across development and operations, including diagnosing difficult production problems under pressure and participating in an on-call rotation.
- Clear written communication, strong documentation habits, and interest in collaborating with internal platform users.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with cloud cost management, including cost allocation, tagging strategies, commitment purchasing, or unit economics.
- Experience with secrets and PKI infrastructure such as HashiCorp Vault.
- Experience with AWS networking at scale, such as VPC design, Transit Gateway, or multi-region connectivity.
- Experience building internal developer tooling such as CLIs, bots, or serverless services, including LLM-powered tools such as retrieval-augmented generation on Amazon Bedrock.
- Experience with observability platforms and managing vendor relationships for engineering tooling.
- Experience operating infrastructure in regulated environments such as GxP or in multi-region environments.
- Experience with GitOps and policy-as-code approaches to infrastructure change management.
- Experience as a technical lead or mentor.
- Experience using AI-assisted development tools to accelerate engineering and operational work.
Responsibilities
- Own projects end to end, from initial design and technical plan through prototype, production rollout, and operational handoff.
- Design, build, and maintain internal applications, APIs, automation, and tooling—including CLIs, Slack apps, serverless services, and AI-powered assistants—for cloud platform and infrastructure workflows.
- Own parts of the AWS foundation, including Kubernetes (EKS), networking, secrets and PKI, and related security and observability capabilities, with clear SLOs, runbooks, and actionable telemetry.
- Advance infrastructure-as-code practices at scale by operating and improving the Terraform Cloud release system, reusable Terraform modules, and related tooling, with policy-as-code guardrails for safe self-service.
- Build cloud cost visibility and anomaly alerting, allocate shared platform costs to the services that drive them, and analyze usage trends.
- Contribute to observability tooling and vendor relationships, and evaluate cost and performance tradeoffs in the monitoring stack.
- Make architectural decisions that other teams build on, drive alignment across multiple teams, and help set technical direction and standards for areas owned.
- Operate and improve production systems, including participating in on-call, incident response, blameless postmortems, and root-cause analysis, and use lessons learned to reduce toil.
- Partner with engineers across Benchling to understand internal customer needs, mentor teammates through design reviews and technical-plan feedback, and help mature tooling, best practices, and engineering processes.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
