Software Engineer, Front-End Developer Tools
Over the next 10 years, biotech will fundamentally rewrite the way we live. Gene editing and cell therapy will dramatically change how we treat cancer and other major illnesses. Biofuels and biomaterials will transform the cars we drive, the clothes we wear, and the makeup of everyday objects. Crop science and synthetic biology will produce sustainable and ethical food. Benchling’s mission is to accelerate the research that propels us towards this future, and magnify its impact, through modern software.
Every day, scientists around the world use Benchling in their efforts to solve humanity's most pressing problems. For these scientists, Benchling is the central technology they use to conduct their research.
Benchling was founded by a team of MIT graduates and has raised funding from Benchmark, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital, and Y Combinator. Our customers include pharmaceutical giants, leading biotechs, and the world's most renowned research institutes.
Life Science R&D requires a breadth of tooling to be productive, such as lab notebooks, molecular design and analysis, physical sample tracking, and multi-stage experiment planning. Benchling builds and operates a rich React application to support scientists, analysts, and executives. The Frontend Dev Tools team brings expertise in web tools, technologies, and architecture to the organization, and influences how Benchling’s applications are built in fundamental ways. Past and current projects include rolling out GraphQL and a browser testing framework to the engineering team.
RESPONSIBILITIES
- Drive web technology initiatives that make product engineers more productive: from initial technology evaluations and decisions through implementation, delivery, and rollout, including teaching and advising engineers across the org about to put these new technologies to best use.
- Design and implement rich frontend components and architecture, such as our UI library.
- Work closely with engineering, product, design, marketing, and sales to ensure the right context is being shared.
- Help rapidly scale our product and team. As a member of the engineering team, you'll be an integral part of how we mature our tooling, best practices, engineering processes, and hiring.
YOU
- Have 5-7 years of experience in software engineering.
- Have deep knowledge and experience with web frontend technologies, such as Javascript, Typescript, React, Angular, Vue, Redux, GraphQL, Webpack.
- Have driven a major technology initiative that affects other engineers as customers.
- Are able to reason about frameworks and architectures. You are able to discern requirements from nice-to-haves, communicate trade-offs, and collaboratively recommend how to evaluate and choose between them.
- Are able to solve complex technical problems, and aren’t afraid to get your hands dirty by diving into open source libraries and submitting fixes.
- Build software with a product-first approach. You ship code quickly, are able to learn and iterate, and care about the real world impact of your code.
- Enjoy ownership and building key pieces of platform and infrastructure.
- Enjoy mentoring other engineers and sharing knowledge across engineering teams.
- Enjoy working with visual and UX designers and care deeply about end-user experience.
- Are interested in learning more about life science (prior knowledge is not required; desire to learn is a must).
YOU MIGHT WORK ON
Check out our engineering blog for some examples of past work. Here are some other examples of recent and future projects:
- Scale our frontend monolith - today, our frontend app is hundreds of thousands of lines of code, currently built and deployed as a single bundle. We plan to rearchitect this to be more modular, enabling faster development cycles and more engineers to work on it concurrently.
- Drive GraphQL adoption - most of our data models are now supported in GraphQL, but much of our application still uses REST and Flux/Redux. We’ve invested heavily in allowing developers to incrementally migrate their products to GraphQL through state syncing and a translation layer. We’re building additional tooling to make this migration process faster and safer.
- Expand and refine our UI library - we're passionate about delivering a stellar user experience to make scientists happier and more productive. We're working with our design team to shape the vision of and define best practices for our UI library. Additionally, we're shipping tooling and modern, attractive UI components for use and extension by product developers.
- Browser-based testing - both for regulatory reasons and to maintain our own high quality bar, we’re rolling out a framework for browser-based UI testing. This means defining standards, abstractions, and best practices for browser tests, and working with other teams to make them a staple in our product development process.
OUR VALUES
- Empower through information. We explain the “why” behind every decision, unless there are highly sensitive circumstances. We're honest about how we're doing, especially in difficult times. We believe that sharing information builds trust and enables better decision-making.
- Rely on tenacity. Hard work is one of the greatest factors to determine success and is fully under our control. We must make the most of every day by bringing the highest level of determination. Dreaming big is not enough.
- Raise the bar. Pushing ourselves and others to improve will be uncomfortable and at times result in failure. However, it's critical to our success. We're dedicated to creating a place where everyone feels challenged to improve.
- Build a lever. We choose to build tools and infrastructure that will help others make world-changing innovations. There's less glory in it, but in the words of Archimedes, "Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world."
PERKS AND BENEFITS
- Beautiful, light-filled office in the Financial District of SF
- Monthly health & wellness stipend
- Work with a talented yet humble team
- Meals and snacks covered
- 401k
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance
- Commuter benefits
- Happy hours, company and team wide social events
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. Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.