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.
ROLE OVERVIEW
App Foundations owns the document and spreadsheet-like table surfaces where scientific data is created, structured, and reused in Benchling. This core foundation enables our Electronic Lab Notebook, execution workflows, and downstream automation; they are how scientific work enters and flows through the platform.
Today, these surfaces are powerful, but challenging for engineers to evolve quickly and safely.
We're looking for a seasoned Product Manager to steward these foundational capabilities, transforming them from tightly coupled implementations to API-driven building blocks with clear contracts. You'll focus on improving engineering confidence in making changes while optimizing for multiplier effects across teams. Strong business acumen is critical: you'll need to connect foundational investments to company priorities, demonstrating how better building blocks accelerate product development and unlock new capabilities. The immediate focus of this role is strengthening the foundation to support strategic investments in new scientific modalities, automation, and AI– not rapid surface expansion.
You'll own tables as a system, including formulas, references, and validation considerations, and unstructured content that supports experiment execution and record-keeping across Benchling. By making these surfaces more structured, automatable, and safer to extend, you'll increase velocity for Benchling product teams building differentiated workflows and help scientists bring new products to market faster.
This role is for someone who enjoys building systems, working closely with scientists and engineers, and making hard prioritization calls. Success comes from understanding both internal and external needs, making difficult tradeoff decisions, and investing in the highest-leverage improvements that make the platform easier and safer to evolve.
RESPONSIBILITIES
- Own the roadmap and execution for document and table-based data input surfaces, with an emphasis on safety and leverage
- Define and improve the behavior of these surface areas, including formulas, computed fields, lookups, and dependency graphs
- Improve developer productivity by making core surfa