Software Engineer, Agents

Benchling; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 165,113 - 223,388; Full time

Job summary

Benchling is looking for an AI Engineer in San Francisco to innovate product experiences that drive adoption of scientific AI. With over 5 years of experience in building consumer-grade products, candidates should have full-stack engineering skills and a strong product intuition. The role involves rapid experimentation, customer interactions, and optimizing onboarding to enhance user engagement. We embrace a diverse team culture and value individuals committed to learning in a fast-paced environment.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience building consumer-grade products.
• Experience with React or similar frontend frameworks.
• Ability to define success metrics and implement event tracking.

Responsibilities

• Build end-to-end product experiences for scientific AI adoption.
• Work with customers to gather feedback and onboard teams.
• Experiment and run A/B tests to improve user retention.

Skills

Full-stack engineering skills

Strong product intuition

Experience in modern frontend frameworks

Experience with instrumentation and analytics

Ability to iterate quickly

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

We’re a team building AI for scientists, including agents that automate toil in everyday scientific work and models that help scientists design better molecules. Our goal is to democratize access to AI, putting it in the hands of every scientist. As an engineer on the team, you’ll build product experiences that drive adoption of AI across the hundreds of thousands of scientists who use Benchling today. You’ll blend strong technical skills and deep product intuition, working across our stack to optimize onboarding, create viral loops, and help scientists understand how to leverage AI in their daily workflows. It’s early days for scientific AI, both at Benchling and in the industry at large. We’ll rapidly iterate with customers and change directions quickly, figuring out new patterns for how we develop and go to market. We’ll win if we stay curious and obsess over our customers.

Responsibilities

• Build end-to-end product experiences that drive adoption of scientific AI, from onboarding flows to in-product discovery, education, and feedback loops.
• Work directly with customers to understand use cases, gather feedback, and onboard scientific teams.
• Experiment rapidly, designing and running A/B tests, instrumentation, and data analyses to identify the biggest levers for user activation and retention.
• Continuously improve our growth platform, developing frameworks and tooling that make it easier to test, measure, and scale successful experiments.
• Shape how we build AI at Benchling, evolving our engineering and product development practices to define what great AI adoption looks like in the scientific world.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience building delightful, consumer-grade products, ideally at a company where growth and experimentation were core to the strategy.
• Full-stack engineering skills, with experience in modern frontend frameworks (React or equivalent) and backend languages (Python or similar).
• Strong product and growth intuition, with the ability to iterate quickly and refine solutions based on user feedback and data.
• Experience with instrumentation and analytics, including defining success metrics, implementing event tracking, and using data to drive decisions.
• Desire to work in a fast‑paced environment, forming hypotheses, testing ideas quickly, and scaling the ones that work.
• Interest in learning about biotechnology and AI (no prior knowledge required, just a willingness to learn and adapt).

How We Work

This is an in‑person team in San Francisco built around collaborating in the office in a fast‑paced environment. We’re in the office Monday through Friday.

EEO Statement

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: $165,113 - $223,388