Head of Search Engineering
Over the coming years, biotech will fundamentally rewrite the way we live. Gene editing and cell therapy are dramatically changing how we treat cancer and other major illnesses. Biofuels and biomaterials are transforming the cars we drive, the clothes we wear, and the makeup of everyday objects. Crop science and synthetic biology are producing sustainable and ethical food. Benchling’s mission is to accelerate the research that propels us towards this reality, and magnify its impact, through modern software.
Every day, scientists around the world use Benchling’s applications, platform, & analytics in their efforts to solve humanity's most pressing problems. For these scientists, Benchling is the central technology they use to conduct their research. Foundational to that research is the ability to search for biological entities, experimental results, and information on a daily basis. Benchling’s search product has to handle billions of entities, multiple scientific paradigms, and be powered by the best of breed relevance technologies. As Head of Search, your role will be to build Benchling’s search product and team capable of achieving this vision.
Benchling was founded by MIT graduates at the intersection of software and biology. We have raised funding from the most accomplished investors in technology including Benchmark, Andreesen Horowitz, Thrive Capital, and Y Combinator. Our customers include giants across the pharmaceutical, agriculture, and materials industries in addition to emerging biotechs and the world's most renowned research institutes.
Role Overview
As the Head of Search, you'll lead the team is delivering the next generation of Benchling's search system. You will be responsible for bootstrapping the efforts to support chemical and biological searches on Benchling. We are looking for a seasoned engineering leader with 5+ years of management experience to build and grow our Search team.
Responsibilities
- Make Benchling a great place to work by actively supporting career development, growth, and mentoring of individuals; and by fostering a fun and inclusive team where everyone feels welcome.
- Build, grow, and manage a team of engineers supporting Search and Discovery on Benchling.
- Own end-to-end availability, reliability and performance of our Search systems.
- Oversee the development of the next generation of Benchling’s search technology, and its integration into our application suite and platform.
- Oversee the development and maintenance of systems for Search APIs and Infrastructure, Search Relevance, and domain-specific searches to discover chemical and biological sequences.
- Establish, continuously improve, and mature the foundational processes and culture on the Search team, in collaboration with other engineering and Infrastructure teams.
Qualifications
- Minimum five years of managing an engineering team, with a track record of building and managing high-performing teams with a culture of quality and continuous improvement.
- Minimum of five years as individual contributor engineer in software development, including experience with delivering Search functionality in the context of a modern, cloud-first software-as-a-service platform.
- Experience with popular open-source distributed search systems, such as ElasticSearch or Solr.
- Understanding of cloud computing and microservices architectures.
- Hands-on experience with software development in Python, Ruby, Java, Go, or Scala, or a similar language.
- Nice to have: Experience with and deep understanding of AWS technologies, and challenges and best practices of operating in an AWS environment
- BS in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience
Benchling welcomes everyone. We believe every member of our team enriches our diversity and inclusion by broadening our ways of problem-solving. Even if you don’t meet 100% of the qualifications for this job, we strongly encourage you to apply.
LEADERSHIP PRINCIPLES
- Admit mistakes and shortcomings
- Deliver results
- Disagree and commit
- Obsess over customers
- Rely on work ethic
- Show empathy
- Recruit and develop the best
- Sweat the details
- Think and communicate clearly
- Unite around the mission
PERKS AND BENEFITS
- Work with a talented yet humble team
- Competitive compensation & equity package
- 401k
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance
- Monthly health & wellness stipend
- Weekly virtual social events, and annual company retreats
- *$1,000 work-from-home stipend
In following best practices and safety protocols, all Benchling employees are expected to work remotely until we are further advised that it is safe for employees to resume work in their respective office locations.
*To support remote work conditions, Benchling provides each employee a one-time stipend of $1,000 upon commencing employment, and additional discounted employee purchase plans for home-office equipment.
We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not 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.