Agentic AI Engineer

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 Biotechnology is rewriting life as we know it, from the medicines we take, to the crops we grow, the materials we wear, and the household goods that we rely on every day. But moving at the new speed of science requires better technology. Benchling's mission is to unlock the power of biotechnology. The world's most innovative biotech companies use Benchling's R&D Cloud to power the development of breakthrough products and accelerate time to milestone and market. Come help us bring modern software to modern science. Benchling is building Intelligence Engineering & Enablement, a small autonomous team within our Security & IT organization. We own three things: internal AI tooling, adoption, and AI-assisted workflows across the company; cross-functional and company-wide agentic AI applications that span departmental boundaries; and the source-of-truth datasets, pipelines, and analytics that all of the above depend on, in partnership with our Data, Analytics & Systems team. We span the bridge between departmental AI experimentation and enterprise-grade agentic systems in production — rapidly prototyping new solutions, and graduating proven prototypes into hardened, well-governed systems with full SDLC rigor. We're built to be enablers. We set the patterns, standards, and shared infrastructure that let departmental teams and AI power users across the company build their own solutions, and we take on the agentic systems that no single team owns. It's early days for enterprise agentic AI at Benchling, and we'll be moving fast — iterating on prototypes, learning from internal customers, and changing direction as the field matures. As the founding engineer for this team, you'll own the technical direction, architecture, and delivery of our agentic AI portfolio. You'll be a player-coach — hands-on most of the time, leading by doing — and partner closely with our AI Product Manager on prioritization and our Data, Analytics & Systems team peers on the data foundations that agentic systems depend on. This is a senior individual contributor role on a flat team: you'll lead the engineering team in ideation, planning, and delivery and you'll drive technical hiring, while people management responsibilities sit with the hiring manager. Check out our engineering blog for examples of past work across Benchling.   RESPONSIBILITIES - Shape technical direction and architecture: Define the foundational architecture for enterprise agentic AI at Benchling — orchestration, agent frameworks, tool integrations (including MCP), memory and state management, evaluation, and observability. Make clear build vs. buy decisions across the stack with documented rationale. - Build and ship the early portfolio yourself: Write production code at least half your time, particularly during the team's first year. Stand up the CI/CD, testing, evaluation, and deployment infrastructure for agentic systems — leveraging existing patterns from Benchling's Build organization wherever possible. Graduate prototypes from the AI Product Manager's discovery cycles into hardened, production-grade systems and own production support under a "you build it, you run it" model. - Design for enterprise from day one: Build for multi-tenant isolation, secrets management, audit logging, payload encryption, role-based access controls, and human-in-the-loop controls calibrated to risk. Partner with Security Engineering on threat modeling for agentic architectures — prompt injection, tool misuse, data exfiltration vectors. - Enable builders across the company: Coach power users and departmental teams on production patterns, develop the criteria that decide which prototype