Software Engineer, Infrastructure (Kubernetes)

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 brings best-in-breed infrastructure to the world’s leading biotech companies, and Kubernetes is at the center of it all. We’re looking for an engineer with deep Kubernetes expertise to join our Platform Services team.

This isn’t about just keeping clusters alive — it’s about re-architecting our Kubernetes platform to support the next generation of scientific workflows, AI-driven research, and secure custom code execution at scale.

You’ll have immediate impact by:

• Driving the effort to simplify and scale our cluster architecture.
• Leading the re-platforming of Benchling’s largest applications onto Kubernetes.
• Designing systems that safely run customer-provided code without compromising security or reliability.

At Benchling, every improvement you make to infrastructure directly accelerates discoveries in drug development, agriculture, and materials science. That’s what we call Team Science : engineers, product managers, and scientists solving hard problems together.

Responsibilities

• Design, scale, and re-architect Kubernetes infrastructure for performance, reliability, and global reach.
  Lead the migration of our core monolith to Kubernetes, ensuring security, scalability, and resilience.
• Build multi-tenant, secure execution environments for untrusted customer code and containers.
• Develop systems for observability, monitoring, and automated remediation that raise the bar for SRE practices.
  Collaborate with colleagues from diverse backgrounds (engineering, product, science) to deliver infrastructure that empowers life science R&D.
• Share your knowledge generously and help grow the next generation of infra engineers at Benchling.

Qualification

• Strong Kubernetes expertise — you’ve operated, scaled, and bent clusters to your will.
  5+ years of experience as a Site Reliability Engineer, DevOps Engineer, or Infrastructure-focused Software Engineer.
• Strong coding ability in Python, Go, or Java to build scalable infrastructure services.
  Experience with AWS or other major cloud platforms; knowledge of virtualization and microservices architectures.
• A mindset for secure, multi-tenant, high-availability environments.

Why this role: This is a chance to work at the intersection of Kubernetes scale and scientific discovery. You’ll tackle hard infra problems, partner across teams, and see your work directly accelerate breakthroughs in biotech.

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 $186,622 to $252,488 .

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

#LI-Hybrid

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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.

Please be aware that Benchling will never request personal information, payment, or sensitive details outside of Greenhouse or via email. All official communications will come from an @benchling.com email address or from an approved vendor alias. If you are contacted by someone claiming to represent Benchling and are unsure of their legitimacy, please reach out to us at [email protected] to verify the communication.