Engineering Leader, Admin Platform

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.

The Admin Platform organization is one of the most critical engineering groups at Benchling. Every user login, every permission check, every rule that governs how scientific data is captured, and every tenant that gets provisioned and managed runs through systems this team owns. The mission of the organization is to keep Benchling secure, configurable, auditable, and operationally reliable, while giving the rest of engineering a strong foundation they can build on with confidence.

This role leads two teams. The Identity Platform team owns Benchling’s core authentication and authorization systems, permissions framework, identity management capabilities such as SSO, SAML, and service principals, as well as validation rules, notifications, and application configuration. The Tenant Lifecycle team owns how Benchling tenants are provisioned, configured, and managed across their full lifecycle. Together, these teams own core platform capabilities that every Benchling customer and every Benchling engineer depends on every day.

This role sits at the intersection of foundational platform ownership and forward-looking product development. In the near term, the organization is driving Delegated Auth to general availability: an OAuth 2.0 Authorization Code flow that allows third-party applications and AI agents to act securely on behalf of users. This work is a key part of Benchling’s broader developer ecosystem and Model Context Protocol (MCP) strategy. Over time, the teams will continue to expand granular permissions, build folder-level access control, and evolve Benchling’s identity and tenant management architecture to meet the needs of increasingly complex and regulated enterprise environments.

This is a strong fit for an engineering leader who enjoys high-leverage platform work, can build credibility with senior engineers through real technical engagement, and can balance operational excellence with delivery of new capabilities. You will partner closely with security, product, and developer platform teams, and your work will directly shape how safely, reliably, and effectively both customers and internal teams use the Benchling platform.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Recruit, develop, and lead a team of exceptional software engineers.

• Translate strategy into execution by developing and executing quarterly plans with clear metrics and targets.

• Define and execute on a roadmap that encompasses new product development, quality improvements, and software maintenance activities. Partner closely with product management and design to define short- and long-term product strategy.

• Hold an unreasonably high bar for product quality as the teams execute their work.

• Partner closely with engineers to ensure that we make excellent technical decisions as we lay the foundations for new products and a scalable platform.

• Meet with customers to understand their science & what they need from Benchling.

• Contribute to engineering-wide organizational improvements as part of the management team.

QUALIFICATIONS

• 5+ years of experience as an engineering manager.

• 5+ years of experience as a software engineer, with experience as a technical lead on projects that involve multiple engineers across multiple quarters

• Track record of growing high-trajectory, early-to-mid-career engineers into leaders with company-wide impact.

• A track record of working with cross-functional partners in product, design, sales, and marketing.

• Experience owning or operating security-sensitive systems, particularly around authentication, authorization, or identity management.

• Experience building shared platform or infrastructure teams that serve internal engineering customers in addition to external users.

• Familiarity with software engineering management productivity tools (e.g., Jira or other bug database), as well as observability tools for logging, metrics, and alerting.

• Interest in / curiosity about biotech! Prior experience with biotech, pharmaceutical, or other life sciences business sectors or education is not required, but is absolutely a plus.

• Willing to work on-site in our San Francisco office three days a week.

• [Strong Plus] Familiarity with OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, SAML, or other industry-standard auth protocols.

HOW WE WORK
Flexible Hybrid Work: We offer a flexible hybrid work arrangement that prioritizes in-office collaboration. Employees are expected to be on-site Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday.

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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.