Engineering Leader, Infrastructure

Benchling • San Francisco, CA

2d • Hybrid

About The Position

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 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. Experience with incident management and managing SRE teams is a plus.

Requirements

• 5+ years of people leadership experience including managing a team across a range
• 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 Haves

• 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.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a team of infrastructure engineers including hiring, coaching, performance management, and career development across all levels of the team.
• Own 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.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Manager
• Education Level: No Education Listed