Software Engineer, Customer Engineering

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.

We’re building an AI scientist for our customers. We can’t do that if we haven’t built the muscle ourselves. AI fluency is the foundation we build on; it's core to how we work, and we're committed to helping every new hire integrate it into their day-to-day. As part of our interview process, you'll complete a brief AI-focused exercise or discussion so we can understand how you think about and use AI to drive impact in your role. Feel free to reference any tools, platforms, or workflows you use today.

ROLE OVERVIEW

Customer Engineering owns two connected mandates: building custom integrations that connect biopharma and biotech customers' scientific and IT workflows directly to Benchling, and building the internal engineering products — desktop applications, Connect adapters, Tenant Operations tooling, and public MCP servers — that make that integration work scale across our whole customer base. See an example of our customer integration work on our website https://www.benchling.com/how-astrazeneca-created-automated-dna-assembly-framework, which describes how we automated DNA assembly to improve efficiency and reduce cost. 

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Collaborate directly with customers to understand complex scientific workflows and implement product integrations.

• Own projects end-to-end, from initial design to production rollout, whether the "customer" is an external biopharma partner or Benchling's own engineering org.

• Strengthen Benchling's APIs and developer platform by leveraging the latest features and acting as the voice of the customer — or the team you're building for — to other groups within engineering.

• Contribute to continuous improvement of the Customer Engineering team’s tooling and best practices, including being hands-on with our testing frameworks and CI/CD systems.

• Help scale our product and team. As a member of the engineering team, you'll be an integral part of how we mature our engineering processes and hiring.

Check out our blog https://www.benchling.com/blog for some examples of what we work on at Benchling. Here are some other examples of Customer Engineering projects:

• Tools to assist with DNA assembly - scientists need to plan which DNA entities should be combined to express a particular protein. They want to automate searching for the possible components of this assembly given desired ratios and what materials are available in inventory.

• Robot and instrument integration - scientists are increasingly using automated hardware in the lab to perform measurements. By integrating Benchling with machines like liquid handlers, we are working towards a world where a scientist can perform a physical experiment entirely using software.

• Tenant Operations - provisioning and configuring a customer's Benchling tenant used to mean manual, one-off engineering work for every request. We're building the internal tools and standardized workflows that let anyone on the team run these operations quickly and consistently, without relying on tribal knowledge.

• Public MCP servers - we build and maintain the servers that expose trusted scientific data sources, like ClinicalTrials.gov http://ClinicalTrials.gov, bioRxiv, and ChEMBL, through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), so AI agents and tools can pull structured data directly into a researcher's workflow.

QUALIFICATIONS

• 2+ years of experience in software engineering

• A customer-first approach to building software

• Familiarity with Python and AWS

• Strong abilities in problem solving and iterating on feedback

• Desire to own projects and interest in the real world impact of your code

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

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).

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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.