Benchling

Product Manager, Infrastructure

Benchling$135K — $160K *
Enterprise Technology
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 6+ years of product management experience, especially in infrastructure or platform systems.
  • Experience making impactful prioritization decisions under pressure, not just facilitating discussions.
  • Ability to convert technical constraints into business stories and vice versa.
  • Strong communication skills for effective stakeholder engagement.
  • Technical fluency to facilitate discussions with engineers without being overly technical.

Responsibilities

  • Own the infrastructure direction by creating a prioritized roadmap based on engineering pain, customer needs, and business goals.
  • Conduct customer discovery to identify infrastructure needs and gather insights on scale and performance.
  • Make and uphold prioritization decisions, clearly communicating trade-offs to stakeholders.
  • Build business cases for infrastructure investments to support organizational decisions.
  • Define requirements by outlining problems for engineering to solve without dictating technical solutions.
  • Coordinate with other teams to balance infra priorities with their needs and ensure alignment.
  • Report on key outcomes related to the roadmap and hold it accountable to defined metrics like reliability and cost.
  • Partner across departments on cloud economics and strategic investments, including budgeting and vendor relationships.

Benefits

  • Flexible hybrid work arrangement prioritizing in-office collaboration.
  • Expectation of in-office presence 3 days a week (Monday, Tuesday, Thursday).
Full Job Description
ROLE OVERVIEW

We're hiring a Product Manager to own prioritization and roadmap for Benchling's core infrastructure teams. You'll turn engineering constraints, customer pain, and business priorities into a clear, defensible roadmap and you'll make the prioritization calls, with the support of the team, to stay focused on the highest-impact work. Success comes from helping the business understand infrastructure constraints and opportunities, and on the other side helping the infrastructure teams stay connected to business to better anticipate future needs and make strategic long-term investments.

You are not expected to be a systems architect or write technical designs but you're expected to understand infrastructure well enough that you can work with engineering to make crisp trade-off calls under incomplete information.

RESPONSIBILITIES
  • Own the infra direction. Convert recurring engineering pain, customer requests, and business priorities into a prioritized, outcome-focused roadmap and product direction with clear rationale for what's in and what's out.
  • Customer discovery. Find the latent infrastructure needs inside Benchling's engineering teams and talk to external customers about scale, performance, and technical direction.
  • Make and hold prioritization calls. When priorities conflict, you can explain the tradeoff to both engineering and executive stakeholders.
  • Build the business case. Translate infrastructure investment into terms the rest of the organization can act on.
  • Define requirements, not designs. Define the problems to solve and provide as much context as you can without dictating the technical solution so that engineering can build against it.
  • Coordinate across orgs. Represent infra priorities to dependent teams and represent dependent-team needs back into the infra roadmap. Program management is required and is a shared responsibility with your engineering manager counterpart.
  • Report on outcomes. Define the handful of metrics that matter for this area (reliability, cost, adoption, developer time saved, just to name a few) and hold the roadmap accountable to them.
  • Partner on cloud economics - Partner with Engineering, Finance, Security, and Procurement on cloud economics and strategic infrastructure investments, including spend forecasting, cost optimization, commitments, credits and incentive programs, vendor roadmaps, and evaluating new capabilities.


QUALIFICATIONS
  • 6+ years of product management experience, with direct exposure to infrastructure, platform, or developer-facing systems.
  • A track record of making real prioritization calls under pressure, not just facilitating consensus. You can describe a time you said no to a senior stakeholder.
  • Comfort translating technical constraints into business narrative, and business priorities into technical requirements, in both directions.
  • Strong communication skills.
  • Enough technical fluency to be credible in a room with engineers, without needing to be the most technical person.


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).

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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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