Software Engineer, Applications (App Foundations) (High Seniority)

Role Overview

The App Foundations group — comprised of our Lab Notebook and Enterprise Lifecycle teams — builds the surfaces and systems at the heart of the Benchling experience. On one side, that's how scientists capture their work every day — the Notebook and the structured data-input tables where experimental data becomes clean, structured, and analyzable. On the other, it's the enterprise lifecycle capabilities that make that data trustworthy at scale: audit trails, review and approval, exports, and backups. These are the features that show up in FDA submissions and GxP-regulated workflows, and they're what lets Benchling's largest customers — internationally recognizable names developing some of the world's most innovative treatments — operate with confidence in regulated environments.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the senior technical authority for the Lab Notebook and Enterprise Lifecycle teams, driving the design and development of the Notebook, structured data-input, and enterprise lifecycle systems that anchor the Benchling product.
• Independently architect and implement solutions to complex, open-ended problems — from system architecture to backend models and APIs to rich frontend UI — in areas such as comprehensive audit coverage, review and approval flows, scalable export systems, backups, and document lifecycle management.
• Lead large, multi-quarter initiatives: break down ambiguous requirements into concrete technical plans and iterative delivery milestones, designing for scale and reliability across a growing enterprise customer base.
• Use technical decision-making as a tool of engineering strategy — knowing when to leverage existing platform capabilities, when to take on technical debt deliberately, and when to preserve optionality for the long term.
• Act as a force multiplier across the Applications division: help set engineering direction, raise standards for quality and architecture, and influence technical choices beyond your immediate teams.
• Provide technical leadership through code review, architectural guidance, and mentorship of engineers across all experience levels.
• Partner closely with product management, design, and cross-functional stakeholders to translate customer needs — including regulatory and compliance needs — into technical solutions.
• Explore and evaluate opportunities to leverage AI and LLMs to improve data capture, audit reporting, and compliance workflows for our customers.
• Collaborate with other teams to ensure our horizontal systems integrate seamlessly and enable product development across the organization.
• Own end-to-end delivery of critical features — from planning and development through deployment, maintenance, and monitoring — and help scale our tooling, engineering processes, interviewing, hiring, and onboarding.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a demonstrated progression of increasing scope and impact.
• Experience as a technical lead on significant projects involving multiple engineers across multiple quarters.
• Strong experience building backend systems and APIs for cloud-based web applications, plus the ability to build full-stack when needed.
• Proven ability to design scalable, robust architectures that align with business requirements and long-term maintainability, especially for horizontal systems that many teams build on.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills — able to produce clear technical designs and use influence rooted in technical expertise to align other engineers on an implementation strategy.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor and develop other engineers, raising the team's bar in areas such as testing, performance, and maintainability.
• Interest in learning about life sciences. Prior biotech knowledge is appreciated but not required; enthusiasm to learn is essential. (Experience with audit, compliance, or GxP-regulated software is a plus.)