Leader, Product Support

Benchling, Inc.; United States; On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Benchling, Inc. seeks a Support Team Leader to guide our regional support operations and incident leadership, partnering with global teams to scale a modern, enterprise-grade support organization.

You will recruit, coach, and grow the team while aligning with leadership on strategic goals and AI-driven workflows. This role emphasizes holistic customer lifecycle ownership, strong cross-functional collaboration, and the ability to act as a credible presence with customers during incidents and

Qualifications

• 2+ years of management experience.
• 5+ years SaaS support or professional services.
• Ability to lead incident management and cross-functional coordination.
• Experience with customer-facing crisis communication.

Responsibilities

• Manage daily support operations, staffing and regional escalations.
• Build team culture, run meetings, coach growth and development.
• Partner with Incident CoE to mature incident process and coverage.
• Analyze incident and support metrics to inform staffing decisions.
• Drive AI adoption across support workflows to reduce ticket handling time.
• Collaborate with Build, Product, TAC, CS, and PS to coordinate issues and keep knowledge current.
• Represent support at customer-facing events as needed.

Skills

Leadership

Team building

Resource management

Customer empathy

Crisis communication

Stakeholder coordination

Tools

Salesforce

Zendesk

JIRA

PagerDuty

Job description

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 OVERVIEW

The Support Team Leader will lead our customer support presence in close collaboration with our Global Support Leadership Team and our CX Leadership Team. This role combines growing a high‑performing regional support team, owning incident management leadership, and helping scale a modern, efficient Support organization through Enterprise‑grade practices and thoughtful AI adoption. We're looking for a leader who approaches Support from the lens of holistic customer lifecycle ownership and is excited to recruit, coach, and grow a team. The right person will be a steady, credible presence with customers and internal partners and will be someone who can help the team flourish, by building out their professional, product & technical skills, and working with key business partners to achieve company goals. This leader will also be a key incident leader, comfortable stepping in as the owner during a live, customer‑impacting incident, driving cross‑functional coordination, and being accountable for the customer communications that follow. We need leaders who are excited by innovation, and who can help us build and scale our global support strategy; adopting AI across day‑to‑day workflows and designing processes that enhance the customer and team experience. We're looking for someone who sees people leadership, incident readiness, and operational efficiency as one connected job.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Manage the daily support operations, including strategic resourcing and staffing, and serve as a first‑line contact for regional escalations, while deeply understanding scientist pain points.


• Build team culture and identity: run regular team meetings, celebrate wins and milestones, invest in career growth conversations, and develop a team where people feel supported and excited to grow.


• Partner with the Incident Center of Excellence (CoE) to mature the incident process (post‑incident reviews, closing CoE action items, formalizing communication playbooks and severity‑based response criteria), and help build and run a sustainable off‑hours coverage model - recruiting, training, and personally rotating in as an escalation responder.


• Analyze incident and support metrics (volume, severity trends, time‑to‑resolution, comms timeliness) to inform staffing and process decisions, and report trends to CX leadership.


• Drive consistent, effective adoption of AI tools across support workflows, piloting opportunities to reduce ticket‑handling time, surface account context automatically, and free up Product Support Analyst time for higher‑value work.


• Collaborate with Build, Product, Technical Account Managers, Customer Success, and Professional Services to coordinate on customer issues and incidents, and ensure the team keeps help content and product knowledge current.


• Represent support at customer‑facing events as needed (customer visits, bootcamps, Benchtalk, conferences).

QUALIFICATIONS

• Experienced leader with a track record of building and developing a team, with 2+ years management experience and 5+ years SaaS support or professional services - or demonstrated leadership, with experience assigning ticket work and managing queues and resources.


• Working knowledge of support and incident tooling and industry best practices for world class customer service in technical support/services environment (e.g. Salesforce, Zendesk, JIRA, PagerDuty, or equivalent incident and support systems).


• Coaches with empathy and exercises judgment prioritizing issues by urgency, severity, and customer health context.


• Skilled in, or has strong aptitude for, customer‑facing crisis communication:knowing what to say, when, and to whom during a live incident, and how to translate technica