Product Manager, Scientific Development Solutions

Benchling; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 163,000 - 221,000; Full time

Job summary

Benchling seeks a Product Manager to own the Recipes, Assays, and Workflows roadmap, guiding prioritization and outcomes for biotech R&D software. You will work with customers, GTM, design, and engineering to translate insights into product direction and shipped features.

You will use SQL, AI, and prototyping to inform decisions, balance speed and quality, and drive adoption across science teams on the Bioprocess platform. This role embraces a systems-thinking mindset and diverse backgrounds.

Qualifications

• 3–5+ years of product management or equivalent experience.
• Diverse career history across 2-3 domains shows systems thinking.
• Strong product taste; ability to translate user needs into features.
• Architectural fluency to reason about data models and state machines.
• Technical tool competency with data, prototyping, or shipping enhancements.
• Clear communication; adapt style to audience and drive alignment.
• Track record of outcomes; evidence of impact in prior roles.
• Intellectual curiosity; willingness to explore and learn.

Responsibilities

• Own the roadmap for Recipes, Assays, and Workflows and decide priorities.
• Engage with customers and GTM teams to translate needs into direction.
• Collaborate with design, engineering, GTM, and customers to ship products.
• Leverage SQL, AI, and dev tools to answer questions or prototype ideas.

Skills

Product management

Cross-domain experience

Product sense

Architectural fluency

SQL / data skills

Communication

Outcome-driven

Curiosity

Tools

Cursor

SQL

Design tools

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

Benchling's platform helps the world's largest biotech and pharma companies develop therapies faster. As a Product Manager on the Scientific Development Solutions team, you'll work on products such as Recipes, Assays, and Workflows that scientists use to do their jobs. These products are fundamental to how scientific processes get configured, run, and tracked across different phases of a drug's development cycle.

We launched Bioprocess in 2024 to help process development teams design, execute, and analyze the experiments that turn a molecule into a manufacturable drug. In 2025, we announced a partnership with Merck (press release) to help their teams develop and test vaccines faster by bringing their analytical workflows onto a single platform.

Today, we're implementing the largest pharma companies in the world on Bioprocess, making the core product better every quarter, and expanding into Analytical Sciences and downstream QC. Our vision is to become the software that helps biopharmas bring therapies to patients twice as fast.

This is a systems design problem disguised as a life sciences product. You'll be working at the intersection of complex configuration, workflow orchestration, and behavior change. You'll figure out how to make powerful software feel intuitive to the scientists who depend on it every day.

You do not need a life sciences background. We're looking for a systems thinker with product taste who can walk into an unfamiliar domain, find the structural patterns, and be effective quickly. The best PMs we've seen for this kind of work have diverse backgrounds. They've built products across meaningfully different problem spaces and bring transferable instincts rather than a single industry playbook.

Responsibilities

• You are responsible for Recipes, Assays, and Workflows. That means you and your team decide what gets built, why, and in what order. You're accountable for the roadmap and the outcomes your roadmap produces.
• To inform what you build, you will spend time with customers and GTM teams to understand how scientists actually work, and how to turn what they ask for into what they need. It's your responsibility to bring that context back to the team and turn it into product direction.
• You'll work alongside design, engineering, GTM, and our customers to build and ship products. That means guiding product decisions with design and engineering, validating ideas early with customers, enabling customer experience teams on what you ship, and partnering with GTM to bring it to market.
• Use tools at your disposal (SQL, AI, developer environment) to be more effective. That can mean pulling your own data to answer a question, building a prototype to clarify direction, or finding a way to find and summarize customer discovery notes. The point isn't the specific tool. It's the drive to find what you need and move fast rather than wait for someone else.

Qualifications

• 3-5+ years of product management or equivalent experience
• A diverse career history. You've worked across 2-3+ meaningfully different domains or product types. This is the single strongest signal we're looking for. It tells us you're a systems thinker who adapts, not someone who relies on one playbook.
• Product taste. You have a track record of building and improving products. You can translate a user requirement into a feature worth building, and you can look at any product and articulate what's broken and why. You understand that shipping software isn't just about delivering requirements. It's about getting a user to change their behavior, form a new habit, and make it stick.
• Architectural fluency. You have experience guiding the architectural decisions of a product. You can reason about data models, state machines, or schema design. You don't write code, but you can spot when a technical decision will create a bad user experience, limit the extensibility of a product, or lead to something that's difficult to revert.
• Technical tool competency. You're resourceful. You use tools to help yourself and your team get work done, whether that's writing SQL queries to make data-driven decisions, using design tools to create prototypes, or using something like Cursor to ship product improvements directly.
• Clear communication. You can lead an engaging professional conversation and keep a room's attention. You know how to adapt your communication style based on your audience and can read and respond to the individuals in the conversation. As a PM, this matters almost more than anything else.
• Track record of outcomes. You've stayed long enough at key roles to ship, learn, and speak to what worked and what didn't. We're looking for evidence of impact.
• Intellectual range. You're genuinely curious, and that curiosity shows up in how you learn and think about problems. Product management is a means to an end. It's how you apply the learnings from the curiosity that has driven you. What you and your team decide to build is an inevitable conclusion of that curiosity.

BONUS

• Experience in regulated or compliance-heavy industries (doesn't have to be life sciences)
• Configuration-heavy, platform-style products
• B2B SaaS in the growth/scaling stage
• Prior life as an engineer, data scientist, or solutions consultant

How We Work

We 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).

Benchling 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: $163K - $221K