Security Engineer at Benchling

This past summer, I was a security engineering intern at Benchling, a biotech startup in SF! It was an amazing opportunity, and I feel greatly indebted to every single person I met there for being so kind and welcoming. I learned a lot about the company, how different security teams all work together in an enterprise, and about the beautiful city.

The recruiter told our 8 person intern class that we were chosen from over 10,000 applicants. Those odds seem insurmountable. I still remember the exact moment I was sitting at my kitchen island scrolling LinkedIn when I came across the job posting. I almost didn’t apply because I thought there was no way I could ever land a job like that; but, remembering I should just shoot my shot, I did anyway, and grew more and more cautiously excited as I moved through the interview process.

I spent half my internship with the Secure Data Engineering team and the second half with the Detection and Response team, both underneath the umbrella of Security Operations. My project was to onboard Slack Audit Logs into our ingestion pipeline with the former team, and then join the latter to write detections and their corresponding runbooks on those logs. At first, I did a lot of research on what events are included in logs, what’s important and actionable for us, and understanding how data flows through our systems. When writing my detection, I had to make lots of revisions to fine-tune it and reduce noise, improve accuracy, and ensure it aligned with real-world attacker behavior. I got some experience with AWS, Terraform, Panther, and also Tines through some other small automation tasks I worked on.

I finished my original project early and was given another one to format Slack exports for the ediscovery process. Before, legal was being given raw Slack exports, consisting of hundreds of JSON files with tons of metadata, which are difficult to review and analyze for investigations. So, I essentially wrote a JSON to PDF parsing and formatting script specifically for Slack, accounting for edited messages, deleted messages, tagged users, irrelevant channels, attachments sent, and much more. Seems like a simple task but there were so many edge cases that really prolonged the completetion of this project. But, I was scripting, and that makes me happy :). Seeing the final result was definitely worth it.

Though this mostly covered the ‘work’ aspect of my internship, there were soooo many fun events, excursions, interactions, and experiences that I could write on and on about. I’ll just say that it was truly the time of my life. I never thought I’d get the chance to have a bougee big tech internship experience in college, and I feel like I got something even better. My experience was truly prioritized and personalized, from having team members fly out every week to meet us, to regular coffee chats with the CISO and happy hour with the CEO, I could not be more lucky to have landed at a truly good company, doing good work, with good people.