Product Manager, App Foundations

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 surfaces lower risk to evolve, through clear contracts, better testability, and reduced coupling

• Expand automation and AI-driven workflows by improving API-enabled capabilities

• Partner closely with our Agents team to safely embed agents directly within document and table surface areas like entries and templates

• Partner with Product Design to drive continuous improvements to the scientist experience through user research, usability testing, and iterative refinement of user flows that reduce friction in data capture without sacrificing data integrity or compliance

• Work closely with scientists, internal product teams, and engineers to deeply understand and support scientific table and documentation needs

• Say no to low-impact or bespoke asks in favor of reusable platform capabilities and long-term platform health

QUALIFICATIONS

• 5+ years of product management experience, strong preference for B2B SaaS, with ownership of platform surfaces, editors, APIs, or other data-heavy systems

• Degree in a life sciences or bioengineering field (e.g., Bioengineering, Biology, Biochemistry, Computational Biology, or Chemistry), or equivalent hands-on experience working with experimental data and scientific documentation in lab or informatics environments 

• Experience supporting scientific or other high stakes data use cases, where data integrity is paramount

• Strong understanding of tables as systems, including formulas, references, and edge cases, especially in scientific or analytical contexts

• Ability to listen deeply, synthesize competing needs, and communicate tradeoffs effectively 

• Rigor in prioritization, with comfort saying no in service of leverage

• Ability to partner closely with engineers on technical design decisions

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).

#LI-Hybrid 

#BI-Hybrid 

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.