Software Engineer (Tools and Automation)

experience is not required.

Join Benchling, a leading life sciences software company, as a Software Engineer focused on Tools and Automation. In this role, you will be part of a small autonomous team within our Security & IT organization, responsible for internal AI capabilities and data analytics infrastructure. You will work closely with various teams, scope problems, and deliver solutions that enhance productivity and efficiency. This is an individual contributor role where you will shape the technical direction, architecture, and delivery of our internal tooling and automation portfolio.

• Define the foundational architecture for internal tooling and automation at Benchling, including integration patterns across our SaaS estate, workflow orchestration, data access, service boundaries, and observability.
• Write production code at least half your time, particularly during the team's first year. Stand up the CI/CD, testing, and deployment infrastructure the team runs on.
• Coach power users and departmental teams on production patterns, develop the criteria that decide which prototypes graduate into enterprise-grade systems, and build the internal-facing developer experience.

• Interest in learning more about life science (prior knowledge is not required)
• A track record of building internal tools, automation, and systems integrations that colleagues depended on daily - not customer-facing product work alone. You have wired together APIs, SaaS platforms, and internal services, and you owned the result in production
• Build software with a product-first approach. You ship code quickly and care about the real-world impact of your work
• Practical experience applying LLMs where they earn their place in a workflow - and the judgment to recognize where they do not. We care that you shipped something that worked and that people kept using, not which framework you reached for
• Enjoy ownership and building key pieces of platforms
• Demonstrated understanding of how to optimize workloads across deterministic and non-deterministic capabilities, striking the right architectural balance for the needs of the specific solution being implemented
• Experience operating in regulated or security-sensitive environments. Solid grasp of enterprise security fundamentals — encryption, access controls, audit logging, secrets management
• Strong communication skills with non-technical audiences specifically. You can sit with a finance, legal, or sales ops team, understand their workflow well enough to challenge it, and come back with an engineering plan they recognize as their own problem - then explain the tradeoffs in their language
• Track record of going from zero to one: a platform, function, or product area you built up from scratch and scaled
• Production experience with at least two of: Python, TypeScript/Node.js, Go; comfort with working across the stack
• Comfortable exercising technical leadership independent of positional authority. You set direction, raise the bar in design reviews, and grow other engineers through influence
• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience building production systems, with strong systems design and integration fundamentals
• Background in enterprise SaaS, life sciences, or biotech
• Familiarity with LLM orchestration and tool-integration patterns (MCP, agent SDKs from major model providers)
• Familiarity with SOC 2, HIPAA, or GxP compliance as they apply to AI systems
• Experience with async orchestration (Temporal, Prefect, Airflow) applied to long-running or agentic workflows
• Experience building internal developer platforms or internal tools at scale
• Direct experience coaching or enabling non-engineers (analysts, ops staff, business power users) to build with AI tooling
• Model research or ML engineering