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
The Support Team Leader will lead our customer support presence in close collaboration with our Global Support Leadership Team and our CX Leadership Team. This role combines growing a high-performing regional support team, owning incident management leadership, and helping scale a modern, efficient Support organization through Enterprise-grade practices and thoughtful AI adoption.
We’re looking for a leader who approaches Support from the lens of holistic customer lifecycle ownership and is excited to recruit, coach, and grow a team. The right person will be a steady, credible presence with customers and internal partners and will be someone who can help the team flourish, by building out their professional, product & technical skills, and working with key business partners to achieve company goals.
This leader will also be a key incident leader, comfortable stepping in as the owner during a live, customer-impacting incident, driving cross-functional coordination, and being accountable for the customer communications that follow. We need leaders who are excited by innovation, and who can help us build and scale our global support strategy; adopting AI across day-to-day workflows and designing processes that enhance the customer and team experience. We're looking for someone who sees people leadership, incident readiness, and operational efficiency as one connected job.
RESPONSIBILITIES
Manage the daily support operations, including strategic resourcing and staffing, and serve as a first-line contact for regional escalations, while deeply understanding scientist pain points.
- Build team culture and identity: run regular team meetings, celebrate wins and milestones, invest in career growth conversations, and develop a team where people feel supported and excited to grow.
- Partner with the Incident Center of Excellence (CoE) to mature the incident process (post-incident reviews, closing CoE action items, formalizing communication playbooks and severity-based response criteria), and help build and run a sustainable off-hours coverage model – recruiting, training, and personally rotating in as an escalation responder.
- Analyze incident and support metrics (volume, severity trends, time-to-resolution, comms timeliness) to inform staffing and process decisions, and report trends to CX leadership.
- Drive consistent, effective adoption of AI tools across support workflows, piloting opportunities to reduce ticket-handling time, surface account context automatically, and free up Product Support Analyst time for higher-value work.
- Collaborate with Build, Product, Technical Account Managers, Customer Success, and Professional Services to coordinate on customer issues and incidents, and ensure the team keeps help content and product knowledge current.
- Represent support at customer-facing events as needed (customer visits, bootcamps, Benchtalk, conferences).
QUALIFICATIONS
Experienced leader with a track record of building and developing a team, with 2+ years management experience and 5+ years SaaS support or professional services – or demonstrated leadership, with experience assigning ticket work and managing queues and resources.
- Working knowledge of support and incident tooling and industry best practices for world class customer service in technical support/services environment (e.g. Salesforce, Zendesk, JIRA, PagerDuty, or equivalent incident and support systems).
- Coaches with empathy and exercises judgment prioritizing issues by urgency, severity, and customer health context.
- Skilled in, or has strong aptitude for, customer-facing crisis communication:knowing what to say, when, and to whom during a live incident, and how to translate technical root cause into clear customer-facing narratives (RCAs/ISNs).
- Experience with Enterprise-grade support: managing high-stakes accounts holistically, building trust with sophisticated customers, and thinking beyond individual ticket resolution.
- Genuine enthusiasm for using AI in support, ideally with hands-on experience piloting or driving adoption.
- Bachelor's degree in a life sciences related field is recommended (biology, microbiology, genetics, biotechnology, neurology, etc.) - direct research or lab experience is a big plus.
- Strong communicator and customer advocate – empathetic, resourceful, and detail-oriented, with excellent written and verbal skills across departments, remote teams, and external stakeholders. Comfortable working independently, adapting quickly to new demands, and solving complex problems with a strong sense of urgency and bias toward action.
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).
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.