Engineering Leader, Notebook

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 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 solve 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. This is where the Notebook team comes in. The Notebook team builds a platform and user experiences to help scientists and lab operators more efficiently capture and work with their data. The team develops structured tables, forms, and data entry tooling that enables scientists to input, transform, and propagate their laboratory data downstream. We focus on both the user experience of scientists working in the lab as well as the ability of other software developers to integrate the components we create into their applications. Increasingly, our work involves developing AI-powered features that make data entry faster, more accurate, and more intelligent. The Notebook team owns components that over 90% of Benchling customers use, and is a key contributor to initiatives with company-wide impact. The team is currently focused on enhancing the core capabilities of the platform that Benchling's most important applications are built on — investing in foundational re-architecture, performance, and scalability work that will unlock new APIs, AI-powered features, and future product capabilities. This is technically complex work that requires careful sequencing and an eye toward long-term payoff. This role is ideal for managers who are energized by deep technical work, who have a track record of leading teams through large-scale refactors and platform migrations, and who find satisfaction in building the foundations that directly enable customer-facing wins. RESPONSIBILITIES - Recruit, develop, and lead a team of exceptional software engineers. - Partner closely with product and design to define roadmap and long-term product strategy. In the near term, drive execution of foundational technical initiatives and API delivery that improve the performance, reliability, scalability, and extensibility of the team's platform, including identifying and prioritizing opportunities for AI-powered features as the platform matures. - Hold an unreasonably high bar for product quality as the team executes its work. - Partner closely with engineers on the team to ensure excellent technical decisions as you lay the foundations for new products and extend mature ones. Directly perform code reviews and engage with the team's codebase. - Meet with customers to understand their science and what they need from Benchling, particularly around