I got a new job! Well, new as of earlier this spring, anyway. From March 2016 to April of this year (2018), I worked at Mavenlink. In May, I started a new job as a software engineer at Benchling (I took some time off in between to travel to Spain and visit family). I’ll explain why I made the switch below.

I loved being an engineer at Mavenlink - it was a fantastic place to work and learn, especially as a new engineer. I learned tons about pair programming, agile practices, working with other departments, teamwork, and many other things. On a day-to-day basis, I was very happy - the work was interesting, I loved my team and the culture, and I had opportunities for growth. Some of my friends and family thought I was crazy to want to leave a job like that (I did too half the time!), but on a longer time scale, I started feeling that I wanted to work on a product I was more excited about. I just didn’t have a passion for project management and resource planning software for the services industry, and gradually that came to bother me more and more. So I started looking for a company with a mission I could get behind.

For me, Benchling fit that criteria. In many ways, Benchling and Mavenlink are similar - they’re both B2B SASS platform startups for specific industries that do a lot of project management type stuff - the idea is you should do all your work on the site, and clients can add on integrations and services. Instead of the services industry, though, Benchling focuses on life sciences, specifically the scientists in the lab performing research, which means our clients are using cutting-edge biological techniques to research awesome stuff like cures for inherited childhood blindness. I love being on the team that’s working on making those scientists’ lives easier and their work faster. Plus, Benchling is free for academics (that’s how it got started), and the academics are the ones inventing the cutting edge techniques that our industry clients are using and figuring out how to use at scale. I’m getting to learn about biology, which I hadn’t touched since high school, and about the bio research industry, which I knew nothing about. Both are fascinating.

If you’re interested in working with us, we’re hiring!