The role
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 hiring a Product Manager to own prioritization and roadmap for Benchling’s core infrastructure teams. You'll turn engineering constraints, customer pain, and business priorities into a clear, defensible roadmap and you'll make the prioritization calls, with the support of the team, to stay focused on the highest-impact work. Success comes from helping the business understand infrastructure constraints and opportunities, and on the other side helping the infrastructure teams stay connected to business to better anticipate future needs and make strategic long-term investments.
You are not expected to be a systems architect or write technical designs but you're expected to understand infrastructure well enough that you can work with engineering to make crisp trade-off calls under incomplete information.
RESPONSIBILITIES
- Own the infra direction. Convert recurring engineering pain, customer requests, and business priorities into a prioritized, outcome-focused roadmap and product direction with clear rationale for what's in and what's out.
- Customer discovery. Find the latent infrastructure needs inside Benchling's engineering teams and talk to external customers about scale, performance, and technical direction.
- Make and hold prioritization calls. When priorities conflict, you can explain the tradeoff to both engineering and executive stakeholders.
- Build the business case. Translate infrastructure investment into terms the rest of the organization can act on.
- Define requirements, not designs. Define the problems to solve and provide as much context as you can without dictating the technical solution so that engineering can build against it.
- Coordinate across orgs. Represent infra priorities to dependent teams and represent dependent-team needs back into the infra roadmap. Program management is required and is a shared responsibility with your engineering manager counterpart.
- Report on outcomes. Define the handful of metrics that matter for this area (reliability, cost, adoption, developer time saved, just to name a few) and hold the roadmap accountable to them.
- Partner on cloud economics - Partner with Engineering, Finance, Security, and Procurement on cloud economics and strategic infrastructure investments, including spend forecasting, cost optimization, commitments, credits and incentive programs, vendor roadmaps, and evaluating new capabilities.
QUALIFICATIONS
- 6+ years of product management experience, with direct exposure to infrastructure, platform, or developer-facing systems.
- A track record of making real prioritization calls under pressure, not just facilitating consensus. You can describe a time you said no to a senior stakeholder.
- Comfort translating technical constraints into business narrative, and business priorities into technical requirements, in both directions.
- Strong communication skills.
- Enough technical fluency to be credible in a room with engineers, without needing to be the most technical person.
HOW WE WORK
We offer a flexible hybrid work arrangement that prioritizes in-office collaboration. Employees are expected to be on-site 3 days per week (Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday).
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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.