Engineering Leader, Infrastructure (San Francisco)

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 OVERVIEWBenchling 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.RESPONSIBILITIESLead 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. 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 QUALIFICATIONSDirect 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.HOW WE WORKWe offer a flexible hybrid work arrangement that prioritizes in-office collaboration. Employees are expected to be on-site 3 days per week (Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday).#LI-Hybrid #BI-Hybrid #LI-CG1Benchling welcomes everyone.We believe diversity enriches our team so we hire people with a wide range of identities, backgrounds, and experiences. We are an equal opportunity employer. That means we don’t discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. We also consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law, including but not limited to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.Compensation Range: $226,223 - $306,066LocationSan Francisco, CAEmployment TypeFull timeLocation TypeHybridDepartmentEngineeringCompensationZone 1$226,223 – $306,066 • Offers EquityU.S. BenefitsFull-time U.S. employees enjoy a comprehensive benefits program including equity, health, dental, vision, 401(k)+ employer match, wellness, commuter, and more.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.