Hybrid Software Engineer, Backend – Infrastructure Engineering

at Benchling

• Job title: Software Engineer, Backend – Infrastructure Engineering
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Junior, Mid level
• Salary: $148,000 - $200,000 per year
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Tech skills: AWS, EC2, Kubernetes
• Location requirements: Hybrid, San Francisco, United States

About the role

• Software Engineer building infrastructure for Benchling’s biotechnology R&D Cloud platform. Collaborate to enhance developer experience and ensure operational reliability in regulated environments.

Responsibilities

• Build, maintain, and improve foundational infrastructure and platform services used by product engineering teams.
• Partner directly with product teams to define requirements, design paved paths, and reduce friction in deploying and operating services.
• Contribute to our Kubernetes-based platform (e.g., Kubernetes, Istio), including service configuration, traffic management, and platform tooling.
• Develop and operate AWS infrastructure and automation (e.g., EKS/ECS, RDS, VPC, EC2, S3), with an emphasis on scalability, cost-awareness, and resiliency.
• Strengthen observability and operational readiness through metrics, logs, tracing, dashboards, and alerting (e.g., Datadog, Sentry, FireHydrant, Sentry, or similar).
• Participate in an on-call rotation, respond to incidents, and drive follow-up improvements to prevent recurrence (automation, hardening, better tooling).
• Write clear technical documentation and contribute to design discussions and reviews; improve systems incrementally with a focus on maintainability and reliability.
• Help ensure infrastructure meets expectations for operating in a regulated environment (e.g., change management, access controls, auditability) when applicable.

Requirements

• 2+ years of experience in software engineering
• Build software with a product-first approach. You ship code quickly and care about the real world impact of your code.
• Have strong abilities in problem solving and iterating on feedback.
• Enjoy ownership and building key pieces of product, while collaborating with other teams.
• Are interested in learning more about life science (prior knowledge is not required; desire to learn is a must).
• Willing to work onsite in our SF office 3 days a week.

Benefits

• Competitive total rewards package
• Broad range of medical, dental, and vision plans for employees and their dependents
• Fertility healthcare and family-forming benefits
• Four months of fully paid parental leave
• 401(k) + Employer Match
• Commuter benefits for in-office employees and a generous home office set up stipend for remote employees
• Mental health benefits, including therapy and coaching, for employees and their dependents
• Monthly Wellness stipend
• Learning and development stipend
• Generous and flexible vacation
• Company-wide Winter holiday shutdown
• Sabbaticals for 5-year and 10-year anniversaries