Software Engineer, Infrastructure
San Francisco, CA

Job Description

Over the next 10 years, biotech will fundamentally rewrite the way we live. Gene editing and cell therapy will dramatically change how we treat cancer and other major illnesses. Biofuels and biomaterials will transform the cars we drive, the clothes we wear, and the makeup of everyday objects. Crop science and synthetic biology will produce sustainable and ethical food. Benchling's mission is to accelerate the research that propels us towards this future, and magnify its impact, through modern software.

Every day, scientists around the world use Benchling in their efforts to solve humanity's most pressing problems. For these scientists, Benchling is the central technology they use to conduct their research.

Benchling was founded by a team of MIT graduates and has raised funding from Benchmark, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital, and Y Combinator. Our customers include pharmaceutical giants, leading biotechs, and the world's most renowned research institutes.

Benchling brings best-in-breed data infrastructure to the world's leading biotech companies. As an Infrastructure Engineer, you'll build the underlying systems that power both user-facing design tools and developer API. Ultimately, your work will be reflected in the agility, performance, reliability, and security of the Benchling platform.

Infrastructure at Benchling empowers engineers on other teams by making their work easier. As the Benchling engineering team triples in size, we'll invest in our underlying data stores, service architecture, and monitoring/tooling so we can build the next generation of our product. Our users are generating more kinds of data at an increasing rate and they're collaborating globally with each other, so our infrastructure needs to grow alongside them. In addition, the data our customers entrust us with is key to their businesses, so our platform needs to be highly reliable and trusted.

As a platform, Benchling is also a developer-facing product where we enable new forms of automation and integration in the life science space. Your work will be used more directly here - Benchling infrastructure extends or replaces our customers' infrastructure to store/process data. You may build systems that form a data pipeline for experimental results, an event queue to trigger customer integrations, or a compute platform to deploy and scale custom analysis.

We are looking for strong engineers with 5+ years of experience to join as a member of the larger Platform team and work alongside a few other infrastructure-focused peers. You'll collaborate with former Stripe, Google, and Facebook engineers to build a highly reliable, yet rapidly-evolving, backbone of our platform.

RESPONSIBILITIES

* Design, build, and maintain core infrastructure hosted on AWS
* Build developer-facing systems to test, build, and deploy
* Define and implement our infrastructural security posture
* Develop monitoring/observability and automation as part of a lean operations function
* These are examples of projects we've worked on in the past or may work on in the near future - our projects are often changing, but this will hopefully give you an idea of the work to be done.
* Planning and implementing a multi-tenant architecture for a (previously) single-tenant product - build out resource isolation and data segmentation as we face a scaling customer base.
* Building a test and deploy pipeline on Buildkite - we have a large test suite and a large number of Benchling instances and need tools to deploy faster while maintaining the same degree of reliability.
* Improving network performance for global users - this is an open-ended problem which needs to be solved as our user base becomes increasingly international.
* Observability - mature our monitoring, tracing, and alerting systems so we have the right dashboards, notifications, and tools to quickly identify and resolve operational issues.
* Building tooling and infrastructure for a more modular/service-based architecture - we're not religious about microservices or monoliths, but we have to scale architecture with our engineering team.
* Building a SQL interface to Benchling - this could range from an ETL pipeline to a full-blown SQL parsing and execution engine. Our customers have their key data in Benchling and want to be able to connect their dashboards, analysis tools, and apps.



OUR VALUES

* Empower through information. We explain the "why" behind every decision, unless there are highly sensitive circumstances. We're honest about how we're doing, especially in difficult times. We believe that sharing information builds trust and enables better decision-making.
* Rely on tenacity. Hard work is one of the greatest factors to determine success and is fully under our control. We must make the most of every day by bringing the highest level of determination. Dreaming big is not enough.
* Raise the bar. Pushing ourselves and others to improve will be uncomfortable and at times result in failure. However, it's critical to our success. We're dedicated to creating a place where everyone feels challenged to improve.
* Build a lever. We choose to build tools and infrastructure that will help others make world-changing innovations. There's less glory in it, but in the words of Archimedes, "Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world."

PERKS AND BENEFITS

* Beautiful, light-filled office in the Financial District of SF
* Monthly health & wellness stipend (up to $100/month on a gym membership, running shoes, or even a massage)
* Work with a talented yet humble team
* Meals and snacks covered
* 401k
* Medical, dental, and vision insurance
* Commuter benefits
* Happy hours, company and team wide social events

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.