Engineering Leader, Infrastructure

Benchling is seeking an Engineering Leader to head a team within Infrastructure Engineering. This is a technical leadership role combining hands-on cloud infrastructure expertise with strong people management, working across infrastructure, platform, and product engineering to drive reliability, scalability, security, and developer productivity in a regulated biotech environment.

About the Role

You'll lead a team of infrastructure engineers while maintaining technical depth in modern cloud platforms and services architecture. This role operates in a regulated environment (GxP/biotech compliance) and requires pragmatic application of SRE principles to balance operational rigor with team velocity. You'll partner closely with Platform Engineering, Security, and Product Engineering teams to align on shared infrastructure roadmaps and outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Lead, hire, coach, and develop a team of infrastructure engineers across all levels, with accountability for performance management and career growth.
• Own delivery of critical infrastructure and services-platform initiatives: reliability, scalability, cost optimization, security posture, and compliance-aligned engineering practices.
• Drive reliability improvements through SRE practices including service-level thinking (SLIs/SLOs), operational readiness, automation, and resiliency patterns.
• Strengthen incident response programs: improve on-call health, incident processes, postmortems, and follow-up execution across teams.
• Build and evolve AWS cloud foundations including network architecture, compute patterns, and Kubernetes-based services.
• Ensure infrastructure changes remain traceable, auditable, and appropriately controlled in a regulated environment without unnecessary friction.
• Partner cross-functionally with Platform Engineering, Security, and Product Engineering on shared priorities and technical roadmaps.

Requirements

• 3+ years of people leadership experience managing teams across multiple levels.
• Strong technical foundation with direct hands-on experience in software engineering and infrastructure/platform engineering.
• Production experience operating on AWS (EKS/ECS, RDS, VPC, EC2, S3) and building scalable internal platforms.
• Strong Kubernetes expertise and services-platform patterns (service mesh such as Istio, ingress, service discovery, workload isolation).
• Experience building or evolving observability and operational tooling (Datadog, FireHydrant, Sentry, or similar).
• Ability to collaborate and influence across teams without direct authority; strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Comfort with Python-primary stacks (Go highly appreciated) and TypeScript in the broader ecosystem, especially for platform tooling.
• Direct ownership of incident management programs (on-call design, incident command, postmortems, and reliability governance) is a plus.
• Experience managing or partnering closely with SRE teams is a plus.
• Experience in regulated environments (GxP, biotech, healthcare, or finance) including change control, auditability, and SDLC rigor is a plus.

Benefits

• Hybrid work arrangement: 3 days per week on-site (Monday, Tuesday, Thursday) in San Francisco, CA.
• Equal opportunity employer committed to diversity and inclusion across all backgrounds and identities.