Engineering Leader, Infrastructure

Role Overview

Benchling is hiring an Engineering Manager to lead a team within Infrastructure Engineering. This is a highly technical leadership role for someone with hands-on experience building modern cloud infrastructure and services platforms, paired with strong people leadership. You’ll work closely across Infrastructure and Platform. You'll be partnering with product engineering teams and other leaders to improve reliability, scalability, security, and developer productivity in a regulated environment. We’re specifically looking for a leader with a software engineering and infrastructure background, not just operations.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a team of infrastructure engineers including hiring, coaching, performance management, and career development across all levels of the team.
• Ownt delivery and outcomes for critical infrastructure and services-platform initiatives including reliability, scalability, cost, security posture, and compliance-aligned engineering practices.
• Drive reliability improvements using pragmatic SRE principles: service-level thinking (SLIs/SLOs), operational readiness, automation, and resiliency patterns.
• Strengthen incident response: improve on-call health, incident processes, postmortems, and follow-up execution in collaboration with product engineering and platform teams.
• Build and evolve cloud foundations on AWS, including network and compute patterns and Kubernetes-based services.
• Partner cross-functionally with Platform Engineering, Security, and Product Engineering to align priorities and deliver shared roadmaps.
• Operate in a regulated environment (GxP/biotech): help ensure infrastructure changes are traceable, auditable, and appropriately controlled, without slowing teams down unnecessarily.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of people leadership experience including managing a team across a range of levels.
• Strong technical depth with previous direct, hands-on experience in software engineering and infrastructure/platform engineering.
• Production experience operating on AWS (e.g., EKS/ECS, RDS, VPC, EC2, S3) and building scalable internal platforms.
• Strong experience with Kubernetes and services-platform patterns (e.g., service mesh such as Istio, ingress, service discovery, workload isolation).
• Experience building or evolving observability and operational tooling (Datadog, FireHydrant, Sentry, or similar).
• Ability to collaborate across teams and influence without authority; strong written and verbal communication.
• Comfort working in a stack largely in Python (Go also highly appreciated), with TypeScript in the broader ecosystem (especially for platform tooling and integrations).

Nice To Have Qualifications

• Direct ownership of incident management programs (on-call design, incident command, postmortems, and reliability governance).
• Experience managing or partnering closely with SRE teams.
• Experience in regulated environments (GxP, biotech, healthcare, finance), including change control, auditability, and SDLC/process rigor.