Engineering Leader, Admin & Identity 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.

ROLE OVERVIEW

The Admin & Identity Platform team is one of the most foundational engineering teams at Benchling. Every user who logs in, every permission check on every piece of data, and every rule that governs how science is captured flows through systems this team owns. The team's mission is to keep Benchling secure, configurable, and auditable, while ensuring that every other engineering team at Benchling can build on top of our identity and permissions infrastructure with confidence.

As the engineering leader for this team, you will lead a group of engineers responsible for Benchling's core authentication and authorization systems, our permissions framework, identity management (SSO, SAML, service principals), validation rules, notifications, and application configuration. This is foundational platform work, the systems you own are deeply embedded across every part of the product, and the decisions you and the team will make have real security, compliance, and reliability implications for Benchling's largest enterprise customers.

The role sits at an interesting intersection of platform reliability and forward-looking product development. In the near term, the team is driving Delegated Auth to general availability, an OAuth 2.0 Authorization Code flow that enables third-party apps and AI agents to securely act on behalf of users. This is foundational to Benchling's MCP and developer ecosystem strategy. Longer term, the team is expanding granular permissions, building folder-level access control, and continuing to evolve Benchling's identity architecture to keep pace with what regulated enterprise environments require.

This is a good fit for an engineering leader who is energized by high-stakes security and platform work, who earns the trust of strong senior engineers through genuine technical engagement, and who can hold both things at once: keeping critical shared infrastructure running well while also shipping meaningful new capabilities. You will work closely with security, product, and developer platform teams, and the work you do will directly shape how safely and effectively Benchling's customers and Benchling's own engineers interact with the 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

• 4+ 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, earl