[Remote] Agentic AI Engineer

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Benchling is an AI platform for biotech R&D, aiming to revolutionize the biotechnology sector. The Agentic AI Engineer will lead the technical direction and architecture for enterprise agentic AI, focusing on building and shipping AI systems while enabling other teams across the company.ResponsibilitiesShape technical direction and architecture: Define the foundational architecture for enterprise agentic AI at Benchling — orchestration, agent frameworks, tool integrations (including MCP), memory and state management, evaluation, and observability. Make clear build vs. buy decisions across the stack with documented rationaleBuild and ship the early portfolio yourself: Write production code at least half your time, particularly during the team's first year. Stand up the CI/CD, testing, evaluation, and deployment infrastructure for agentic systems — leveraging existing patterns from Benchling's Build organization wherever possible. Graduate prototypes from the AI Product Manager's discovery cycles into hardened, production-grade systems and own production support under a 'you build it, you run it' modelDesign for enterprise from day one: Build for multi-tenant isolation, secrets management, audit logging, payload encryption, role-based access controls, and human-in-the-loop controls calibrated to risk. Partner with Security Engineering on threat modeling for agentic architectures — prompt injection, tool misuse, data exfiltration vectorsEnable builders across the company: Coach power users and departmental teams on production patterns, develop the criteria that decide which prototypes graduate into enterprise-grade systems, and build the internal-facing developer experience — templates, SDKs, sandboxes — that lets builders outside this team ship safelyPartner across functions: Work closely with our Data, Analytics & Systems team peers on the source-of-truth datasets and pipelines that agentic systems depend on. Engage with department leaders on the workflows we're transforming, and with Benchling's platform and infrastructure teams to leverage existing capabilities rather than build parallel systemsElevate engineering standards: Set the bar for code quality, testing and evaluation, documentation, and on-call practices. Drive technical hiring through interview loop design, bar-raising in interviews, and representing the team to senior candidates. Mentor engineers on the team and other AI builders across the companySkills7+ years of professional software engineering experience building production systems, with strong systems design fundamentalsHands-on experience building production systems that integrate with LLMs and/or agentic patterns: orchestration, tool use, memory and state management, evaluation, and observabilityDemonstrated understanding of how to optimize workloads across deterministic and non-deterministic capabilities, striking the right architectural balance for the needs of the specific solution being implementedProduction experience with at least two of: Python, TypeScript/Node.js, Go; comfort with working across the stackHands-on expertise with LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic), agentic frameworks (LangChain, CrewAI), RAG over business content (Confluence, contracts, policies), vector databases (pgvector, Pinecone), workflow automation (n8n, Langflow), and LLM observability and evaluation tooling (LangSmith, Arize)Track record of going from zero to one: a platform, function, or product area you built up from scratch and scaledExperience operating in regulated or security-sensitive environments. Solid grasp of enterprise security fundamentals — encryption, access controls, audit logging, secrets managementComfortable exercising technical leadership independent of positional authority. You set direction, raise the bar in design reviews, and grow other engineers through influenceBuild software with a product-first approach. You ship code quickly and care about the real-world impact of your workEnjoy ownership and building key pieces of platformsStrong communication skills with both technical and non-technical audiences. You can translate department workflows into engineering plans, and engineering tradeoffs into business languageInterest in learning more about life science (prior knowledge is not required)Background in enterprise SaaS, life sciences, or biotechFamiliarity with LLM orchestration patterns and frameworks (LangGraph, MCP, agent SDKs from major model providers)Experience with async orchestration (Temporal, Prefect, Airflow) applied to long-running or agentic workflowsFamiliarity with SOC 2, HIPAA, or GxP compliance as they apply to AI systemsExperience building internal developer platforms or internal tools at scaleDirect experience coaching or enabling non-engineers (analysts, ops staff, business power users) to build with AI toolingCompany OverviewBenchling is an IT company that provides a cloud-based software platform for biology researchers and research and development organizations. It was founded in 2012, and is headquartered in San Francisco, California, USA, with a workforce of 501-1000 employees. Its website is https://www.benchling.com.Company H1B SponsorshipBenchling has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships, with 3 in 2026, 19 in 2025, 24 in 2024, 11 in 2023, 18 in 2022, 10 in 2021, 5 in 2020. Please note that this does not guarantee sponsorship for this specific role.