Software Engineer, Backend (Infrastructure Engineering)

Biotechnology is rewriting life as we know it, from the medicines we take, to the crops we grow, the materials we wear, and the household goods that we rely on every day. But moving at the new speed of science requires better technology.

Benchling’s mission is to unlock the power of biotechnology. The world’s most innovative biotech companies use Benchling’s R&D Cloud to power the development of breakthrough products and accelerate time to milestone and market.

Come help us bring modern software to modern science.

ROLE OVERVIEW

Benchling is hiring a Software Engineer for our Infrastructure Engineering team to build and operate the platform that powers our product. You’ll have the opportunity to work across a broad range of infrastructure disciplines, including cloud infrastructure in AWS, our Kubernetes-based services platform, and the observability and operational tooling that keeps systems reliable. This role is highly collaborative: you’ll partner closely with product engineering teams to understand their needs and improve the developer experience across Benchling.

We’re looking for a strong early-career engineer with solid fundamentals and a growth mindset, someone excited to learn, contribute across a wide surface area, and take ownership over time. Benchling operates in a regulated environment, so you’ll help build systems with reliability, security, and auditability in mind.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Build, maintain, and improve foundational infrastructure and platform services used by product engineering teams.

• Partner directly with product teams to define requirements, design paved paths, and reduce friction in deploying and operating services.

• Contribute to our Kubernetes-based platform (e.g., Kubernetes, Istio), including service configuration, traffic management, and platform tooling.

• Develop and operate AWS infrastructure and automation (e.g., EKS/ECS, RDS, VPC, EC2, S3), with an emphasis on scalability, cost-awareness, and resiliency.

• Strengthen observability and operational readiness through metrics, logs, tracing, dashboards, and alerting (e.g., Datadog, Sentry, FireHydrant, Sentry, or similar).

• Participate in an on-call rotation, respond to incidents, and drive follow-up improvements to prevent recurrence (automation, hardening, better tooling).

• Write clear technical documentation and contribute to design discussions and reviews; improve systems incrementally with a focus on maintainability and reliability.

• Help ensure infrastructure meets expectations for operating in a regulated environment (e.g., change management, access controls, auditability) when applicable.

QUALIFICATIONS

• 2+ years of experience in software engineering.

• Build software with a product-first approach. You ship code quickly and care about the real world impact of your code.

• Have strong abilities in problem solving and iterating on feedback.

• Enjoy ownership and building key pieces of product, while collaborating with other teams.

• Are interested in learning more about life science (prior knowledge is not required; desire to learn is a must).

• Willing to work onsite in our SF office 3 days a week.

HOW WE WORK

We offer a flexible hybrid work arrangement that prioritizes in-office collaboration. Employees are expected to be on-site 3 days per week (Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday).

SALARY RANGE

Benchling takes a market-based approach to pay. The candidate's starting pay will be determined based on job-related skills, experience, qualifications, interview performance, and work location. For this role the base salary range is $148,000 to $200,000

To help you determine which zone applies to your location, please see this resource . If you have questions regarding a specific location's zone designation, please contact a recruiter for additional information.

Total Compensation includes the following:

• 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

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Benchling welcomes everyone.

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.