Benchling

Leader, Product Support

Benchling • $110K — $130K *
Pharmaceuticals & Biotech
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 2+ years of management experience leading a team in SaaS support or professional services.
  • 5+ years of experience in SaaS support or professional services, with a strong understanding of technical support.
  • Knowledge of support tools like Salesforce, Zendesk, JIRA, and PagerDuty for incident management and customer service best practices.
  • Strong crisis communication skills, with experience in translating technical issues into customer-friendly narratives.
  • Experience in managing and building relationships with high-stakes enterprise accounts, focusing beyond just ticket resolution.
  • Genuine interest and experience in leveraging AI within support workflows and processes.
  • Bachelor's degree in life sciences or related field; direct lab or research experience is advantageous.

Responsibilities

  • Manage daily support operations, focusing on strategic staffing and handling regional escalations.
  • Cultivate team culture through regular meetings, career growth discussions, and recognition of achievements.
  • Partner with the Incident Center of Excellence to enhance incident management processes and maintain off-hours coverage.
  • Analyze incident metrics to inform process improvements and provide insights to leadership.
  • Drive the adoption of AI tools in support workflows to optimize efficiency and reduce ticket handling time.
  • Collaborate across departments to resolve customer issues, ensuring up-to-date help content and product knowledge.
  • Represent support at customer-facing events, fostering relationships and gathering feedback.

Benefits

  • Flexible hybrid work arrangement with in-office collaboration three days per week.
  • Opportunities for career growth and professional development through supportive management practices.
  • The chance to work with cutting-edge AI technologies in customer support.
  • A culture that emphasizes team identity and recognizes individual and group achievements.
Full Job Description
ROLE OVERVIEW

The Support Team Leader will lead our customer support presence in close collaboration with our Global Support Leadership Team and our CX Leadership Team. This role combines growing a high-performing regional support team, owning incident management leadership, and helping scale a modern, efficient Support organization through Enterprise-grade practices and thoughtful AI adoption.

We're looking for a leader who approaches Support from the lens of holistic customer lifecycle ownership and is excited to recruit, coach, and grow a team. The right person will be a steady, credible presence with customers and internal partners and will be someone who can help the team flourish, by building out their professional, product & technical skills, and working with key business partners to achieve company goals.

This leader will also be a key incident leader, comfortable stepping in as the owner during a live, customer-impacting incident, driving cross-functional coordination, and being accountable for the customer communications that follow. We need leaders who are excited by innovation, and who can help us build and scale our global support strategy; adopting AI across day-to-day workflows and designing processes that enhance the customer and team experience. We're looking for someone who sees people leadership, incident readiness, and operational efficiency as one connected job.
RESPONSIBILITIES

Manage the daily support operations, including strategic resourcing and staffing, and serve as a first-line contact for regional escalations, while deeply understanding scientist pain points.
  • Build team culture and identity: run regular team meetings, celebrate wins and milestones, invest in career growth conversations, and develop a team where people feel supported and excited to grow.
  • Partner with the Incident Center of Excellence (CoE) to mature the incident process (post-incident reviews, closing CoE action items, formalizing communication playbooks and severity-based response criteria), and help build and run a sustainable off-hours coverage model - recruiting, training, and personally rotating in as an escalation responder.
  • Analyze incident and support metrics (volume, severity trends, time-to-resolution, comms timeliness) to inform staffing and process decisions, and report trends to CX leadership.
  • Drive consistent, effective adoption of AI tools across support workflows, piloting opportunities to reduce ticket-handling time, surface account context automatically, and free up Product Support Analyst time for higher-value work.
  • Collaborate with Build, Product, Technical Account Managers, Customer Success, and Professional Services to coordinate on customer issues and incidents, and ensure the team keeps help content and product knowledge current.
  • Represent support at customer-facing events as needed (customer visits, bootcamps, Benchtalk, conferences).
QUALIFICATIONS

Experienced leader with a track record of building and developing a team, with 2+ years management experience and 5+ years SaaS support or professional services - or demonstrated leadership, with experience assigning ticket work and managing queues and resources.
  • Working knowledge of support and incident tooling and industry best practices for world class customer service in technical support/services environment (e.g. Salesforce, Zendesk, JIRA, PagerDuty, or equivalent incident and support systems).
  • Coaches with empathy and exercises judgment prioritizing issues by urgency, severity, and customer health context.
  • Skilled in, or has strong aptitude for, customer-facing crisis communication:knowing what to say, when, and to whom during a live incident, and how to translate technical root cause into clear customer-facing narratives (RCAs/ISNs).
  • Experience with Enterprise-grade support: managing high-stakes accounts holistically, building trust with sophisticated customers, and thinking beyond individual ticket resolution.
  • Genuine enthusiasm for using AI in support, ideally with hands-on experience piloting or driving adoption.
  • Bachelor's degree in a life sciences related field is recommended (biology, microbiology, genetics, biotechnology, neurology, etc.) - direct research or lab experience is a big plus.
  • Strong communicator and customer advocate - empathetic, resourceful, and detail-oriented, with excellent written and verbal skills across departments, remote teams, and external stakeholders. Comfortable working independently, adapting quickly to new demands, and solving complex problems with a strong sense of urgency and bias toward action.
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).

About Benchling

Benchling is a cloud-based informatics platform that accelerates life sciences R&D by streamlining workflows and centralizing data. The platform offers a suite of applications for molecular biology, including DNA design, antibody design, CRISPR analysis, and protein expression. Benchling's customers include pharmaceutical companies, biotechs, and academic institutions. The company was founded in 2012 and is headquartered in South San Francisco, California.
Learn more about Benchling
Size
500 employees
Industry
Founded
2012

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