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Benchling is the AI platform for biotech R&D, used by over 200,000 scientists globally and trusted by companies like Sanofi and Moderna. The company is building AI & Data Engineering, a small autonomous team within Security & IT that owns internal AI capabilities and source-of-truth data & analytics infrastructure.
As the founding engineer for this team, you will own the technical direction, architecture, and delivery of Benchling's internal tooling and automation portfolio. This is a hands-on individual contributor role where you'll spend at least half your time writing production code, particularly in the team's first year. You'll be a player-coach, leading by doing and partnering closely with the AI Product Manager on prioritization and the Data Analytics & Science team on data foundations.
Key responsibilities include: defining foundational architecture for internal tooling and automation (integration patterns, workflow orchestration, data access, service boundaries, observability); building and shipping the early portfolio yourself, including CI/CD, testing, and deployment infrastructure; designing for enterprise from day one with multi-tenant isolation, secrets management, audit logging, encryption, RBAC, and human-in-the-loop controls; enabling builders across the company through coaching, developer experience tools, and templates; and partnering across functions with data analytics peers and department leaders.
You'll shape technical decisions around build vs. buy, own production support under a "you build it, you run it" model, and work closely with Security Engineering on threat modeling for internal systems and agentic workflows. This is early-stage work in enterprise agentic AI at Benchling, moving fast with rapid iteration and learning from internal customers. AI fluency is foundational to how the company works, though this role focuses on building reliable internal systems and integrations rather than ML research or model development.
