Benchling

The biggest pro for Benchling is the quality of the people that work here. Benchling tries to optimize for people skills as well as technical skills when hiring engineers, and it really shows in day-to-day interactions with the team. I'm consistently learning from people through technical designs, leadership qualities, and empathy to users and coworkers alike.

Benchling's application services a highly sophisticated user base - lab scientists and administrators. I personally get a lot of joy building tech that works really closely with science. Even though we don't have any requirements to have a scientific background to be an engineer here, we get to work alongside scientific experts within Benchling to build features that serve highly complex workflows within biology and chemistry. Moreover, we get to learn from our coworkers with scientific backgrounds via monthly lectures and product council feedback.

Lastly, I'd mention that Benchling has a positive impact via the mission of the company. Bringing 21st-century tooling to scientists meaningfully helps to improve collaboration and productivity, which, in turn, helps to increase the speed at which our customers can deliver really impactful products. While there are a lot of places in tech that you can solve interesting technical problems in service of goals that don't help society, I've found that Benchling is one of the companies that is able to straddle interesting problems with a positive impact.

Benchling is a fast-growing company, and as such, there are some growing pains of figuring out what tooling, processes, and architectures worked well for a smaller team, but need to be improved for an increasingly large engineering organization. I've been happy that leadership acknowledges and invests here, but we have and will continue to run into challenges where we need to invest more in developer productivity than a comparable company that is not going through hypergrowth.