Software Engineer, Data Platform (Lead)

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

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Data Platform Engineering group, you will be responsible for designing and implementing scalable, multi-tenant services and APIs that serve as the foundation of our enterprise SaaS offerings. You will define and champion the long-term technical vision, ensuring our platform aligns with company goals and industry best practices on distributed systems.  Your expertise will drive the evolution of our infrastructure, data pipelines, and core platform capabilities to enable seamless and reliable experiences for developers and customers alike.

You will collaborate closely with application teams, infrastructure engineers, and product managers to translate business needs into robust platform services. Your contributions will enhance the scalability, performance, and security of our platform while fostering innovation and efficiency across engineering teams. If you are passionate about building high-impact, foundational platform services and enjoy working in a dynamic, cross-functional environment, this role is for you.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Own projects end-to-end, from design and prototyping to deployment and large-scale rollout.
• Define and champion the long-term technical vision, ensuring our platform aligns with industry best practices and company goals.
• Collaborate effectively with stakeholders such as application teams, infrastructure teams, and PMs to understand requirements and translate them into scalable infrastructure and platform services.
• Design and implement resilient APIs, distributed systems, and core infrastructure services that serve both internal and external developers.
• Ensure high availability, performance, and security through proactive monitoring, testing, and optimization.
• Mentor and support other engineers, fostering technical excellence and knowledge sharing across the team.
• Drive continuous improvement in engineering processes, tooling, and architectural decisions.

QUALIFICATIONS

• Platform Experience: At least 8 years of experience designing and implementing highly scalable multi-tenant services & APIs with well-defined Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for internal developers.
• Technical Vision and Influence: Ability to define and execute a multi-year platform strategy that improves system scalability, developer experience, and operational efficiency.
• Cross-Functional Partnership: Proven ability to collaborate with application teams, infrastructure teams, and product managers to translate business needs into platform capabilities.
• Communication: Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to engage stakeholders at all levels, including senior leadership.
• Distributed Systems: Experience building highly scalable data transformation and ingestion pipelines while ensuring proactive data integrity and privacy.
• Real-Time Data Technologies: Hands-on experience with technologies like Elastic/OpenSearch, Kafka, Kinesis, Spark, or Flink.
• Infrastructure Management: Experience with deployment and configuration management tools like Terraform, Ansible, Chef, and container systems like Kubernetes or Amazon ECS.
• Database Expertise: Strong knowledge of RDBMS (Postgres) and NoSQL (DynamoDB), including database indexing and SQL performance tuning.

Desirable Qualifications

• Experience in the design and development of search platforms to support internal and external developers.
• At least 2+ years of experience in operating infrastructure for search systems like Elasticsearch/OpenSearch/Lucene.

 

 

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 3 days per week.

SALARY RANGE

Benchling takes a market-based approach to pay.  The candidate's starting pay will be determined based on job-related skills, experience, qualifications, interview performance, and work location. For this role the base salary range is $186,622 to $