Software Engineer, Backend (Usage & Billing Platform)

Biotechnology is rewriting life as we know it, from the medicines we take, to the crops we grow, the materials we wear, and the household goods that we rely on every day. But moving at the new speed of science requires better technology.Benchling’s mission is to unlock the power of biotechnology. The world’s most innovative biotech companies use Benchling’s R&D Cloud to power the development of breakthrough products and accelerate time to milestone and market. Come help us bring modern software to modern science.

ROLE OVERVIEW

As a software engineer on the Usage & Billing Platform team, you will design, build, and operate the systems that power Benchling’s usage metering, rating, and billing which are foundational to how we deliver and monetize consumption-based products. Your work will enable Benchling to scale its product offerings with financial-grade accuracy and customer transparency, while shaping the technical strategy and best practices that product and platform teams rely on to instrument features and reason about cost, value, and growth.

The breadth of Benchling’s products means a one-size-fits-all approach to metering won’t work. Our platform empowers internal application teams to emit canonical usage events, define meters and aggregation windows, and model dimensions such as units, tiers, and entitlements, all natively integrated with Benchling. As an engineer on the team, you’ll own the evolution of these capabilities end-to-end: from high-throughput, low-latency ingestion and exactly-once aggregation to backfills, reconciliation, and data quality guardrails (idempotency, deduplication, lineage). You’ll ensure usage data is trustworthy “at rest” and immediately actionable “in motion,” enabling real-time product experiences (e.g., quotas, alerts, in-app usage views) and downstream analytics.

This team also owns the Billing Platform, the source of truth for plans, pricing, discounts and credits, and invoice generation, as well as the internal APIs and tooling that make usage-based monetization consistent by default across Benchling. Team members define modeling standards and developer ergonomics for event schemas and meters, and steward interfaces to adjacent systems such as identity & entitlements, data warehousing & reporting, ERP/payment providers, and revenue recognition. You’ll help set the bar for reliability, auditability, and compliance, partnering closely with Product, Finance, RevOps, and Security to ensure our platform is robust, transparent, and ready for scale.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Design, build, and operate high-throughput usage metering pipelines (event schemas, exactly-once ingestion, windowed aggregation), including backfills, reconciliation, and strong data-quality guarantees (idempotency, deduplication, lineage).

• Develop and evolve Billing Platform primitives including plans, pricing, entitlements, discounts/credits, invoicing, as well as integrations with identity, data warehouse, ERP/payment providers; ensure auditability, compliance, and financial-grade accuracy.

• Ship real-time product experiences powered by usage (quotas, alerts, in-app dashboards) and robust observability; define SLAs and lead incident response for platform reliability.

• Partner with Product, Finance, RevOps, Security, and Application teams to translate business rules into meters and pricing models; validate with experiments and usage analytics.

• Improve developer ergonomics and consistency across Benchling via clear APIs/SDKs, instrumentation standards, documentation, and mentorship; drive continual improvements to team process and tooling.

QUALIFICATIONS

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, ideally in SaaS and/or platform engineering.

• Proficiency in backend development and API design with Python, Go, Java, or TypeScript (Benchling uses Python internally for most systems); strong data modeling skills and experience with transactional (e.g., Postgres) and analytical stores (e.g., Snowflake/ClickHouse).

• Experience designing and operating distributed systems and event-driven/streaming pipelines (e.g., Kafka/Kinesis/Pub/Sub) plus batch processing (e.g., Spark/Flink/Beam); solid testing and reliability practices.

• Track record of delivering projects end-to-end and collaborating with Product, Finance, RevOps, and Security to translate business rules into meters, pricing, and invoicing.

• Deep care for data quality and correctness (idempotency, deduplication, reconciliation/backfills, lineage/audit trails) and familiarity with SLIs/SLOs, observability (metrics/logs/tracing), and incident response.

• Nice to have: experience building or integrating metered consumption systems (e.g., OpenMeter, Metronome), payment/ERP providers (e.g., Stripe, NetSuite), and downstream analytics/revenue recognition tooling.

• Excellent communication and documentation skills; ability to mentor peers and improve developer ergonomics through clear APIs, instrumentation standards, and tooling.

• Enthusiasm for complex technical challenges and an interest in the life sciences domain.

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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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.