Founding Internal Tools & Automation Engineer (AI)

Benchling; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 195,000 - 265,000; Full time

Job summary

Benchling is seeking a founding engineer for an internal tools and automation team in our Security & IT organization. You will own architecture, delivery, and scaling of internal tooling, shipping production systems and enabling cross‑functional teams across the company.

You will lead hands‑on development, drive architectural decisions, and collaborate with AI product, data analytics, and security to ensure robust, secure, and scalable solutions while shaping the engineering culture and hiring.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience building production systems.
• Proven track record building internal tools, automation, and systems integrations.
• Experience wiring APIs, SaaS platforms, and internal services to production.

Responsibilities

• Shape technical direction and architecture for internal tooling and automation.
• Write production code and stand up CI/CD, testing, and deployment infra.
• Design for multi-tenant isolation, secrets management, and audit logging.
• Coach power users and developers on production patterns and DX.
• Partner with data analytics and security teams to align data and threat modeling.
• Mentor engineers and drive hiring while leading the team.

Skills

Strong communication

Leadership

Product mindset

Cross-functional collaboration

Problem solving

Tools

Python

TypeScript/Node.js

Go

APIs & integrations

LLM orchestration

Job description

Benchling is seeking a founding engineer for an internal tools and automation team in our Security & IT organization. You will own architecture, delivery, and scaling of internal tooling, shipping production systems and enabling cross‑functional teams across the company.

You will lead hands‑on development, drive architectural decisions, and collaborate with AI product, data analytics, and security to ensure robust, secure, and scalable solutions while shaping the engineering culture and hiring.