Software Engineer, Applications (High Seniority)

Biotechnology is rewriting life as we know it, from the medicines we take, to the crops we grow, the materials we wear, and the household goods that we rely on every day. But moving at the new speed of science requires better technology.

Benchling’s mission is to unlock the power of biotechnology. The world’s most innovative biotech companies use Benchling’s R&D Cloud to power the development of breakthrough products and accelerate time to milestone and market. 

Come help us bring modern software to modern science.

ROLE OVERVIEW

Benchling is on a mission to accelerate the pace of life sciences research and development. To do that, we build a suite of tools that scientists use daily to tackle humanity's most pressing problems. The tools we build must be optimized to make scientists more efficient in their work, across a broad spectrum of research, development, and manufacturing tasks.

Our existing platform offers an innovative lab notebook, several LIMS components such as inventory management, a results database and entity registry, and enterprise capabilities like workflow support. Most of these offerings are predominantly oriented at research scientists. Benchling’s focus has expanded to include areas such as process development and clinical assay execution, packaged as more comprehensive solution-based offerings. Delivering these solutions involves augmenting applications as well as developing new ones. Moreover, a user of a given solution will interact with several integrated applications within Benchling to accomplish their scientific goals. As such, there are more dependencies between distinct applications, and more components of functionality that will be reused in many different applications and contexts. The user experience needs to consider the end-to-end workflows a user will perform and a variety of nuanced use-cases and opportunities for customization required by sophisticated and demanding clients performing advanced lab work. 

Benchling is seeking an experienced software engineer who has a proven multi-year track record of delivery of an enterprise system composed of multiple applications or components to help orchestrate the work of several technical teams across the Applications pillar within Software Engineering, ensure consistency of design, and set our architecture and system up for success and expansion for the years to come.

As one of our most senior engineers, you will work closely with engineering leadership, product management, and engineers of all levels across the Applications pillar and Engineering to define the technical foundation for these applications and feature enhancements and assist in their delivery. You should expect a mix of technical design work, hands-on engineering, mentorship of other engineers, and engagement with senior stakeholders to ensure a comprehensive, high-quality product is delivered on time. 

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Lead the architecture of one or more solution-based offerings.
• Identify key technology choices, lead the team to a sound design, and ensure development success.
• Use technical decision making as a tool of engineering strategy: identify how to best leverage existing system capabilities and engineering resources across teams to efficiently deliver solutions to our customers; use technical debt wisely as a tool to balance short- and long-term objectives; identify technical choices that add functionality quickly or preserve optionality for the long term.
• Empower engineering team members to deliver and improve the quality and velocity of their delivery through mentorship and teamwork.
• Design and implement key functionality from system architecture to backend models and API endpoints to front end UI for complex scientific workflows.
• Collaborate with product managers, designers, and engineering leadership to ensure the right context is being shared.
• Help rapidly scale our product and team. As a member of the engineering team, you'll be an integral part of how we mature our tooling, standard methodologies, engineering processes, and hiring.

QUALIFICATIONS

• Have 8+ years of experience in software engineering.
• Evidence that you build software with a product-first approach and ship with a focus on impact. You write code quickly, with quality, and care about the real world impact of your code.
• Demonstrated delivery of complex enterprise systems, and solid software architecture thinking and design skills.
• Proven track record of continuous learning. We have a comprehensive React-based frontend and python backend, built on top of a predominantly relational data storage model in Postgres. Prior direct experience with our stack is appreciated but not required–but you should be facile with these technologies or able to pick them