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Product Development Jobs in San Rafael, CA (NOW HIRING)

New Product Scientist

San Francisco, CA ยท On-site

$170K - $190K/yr

Role Overview R&D is the engine behind Plasmidsaurus's long-term growth. As a New Product Scientist, you will help define what RNA sequencing looks like next. Your work will create entirely new ...

Showing results 41-60

Product Development information

See San Rafael, CA salary details

$47.4K

$141.6K

$161.1K

How much do product development jobs pay per year?

As of Aug 15, 2026, the average yearly pay for product development in San Rafael, CA is $141,554.00, according to ZipRecruiter salary data. Most workers in this role earn between $127,600.00 and $159,400.00 per year, depending on experience, location, and employer.

What skills do you need to be a product development?

Product development professionals need strong skills in project management, market research, and technical knowledge relevant to their industry. They should have excellent communication, problem-solving abilities, and proficiency with tools like CAD software or data analysis programs. Understanding customer needs and working collaboratively across teams are also essential for success in this role.

What is product development?

Product development is the process of creating new products or enhancing existing products to improve market value. It includes all aspects of research, design, testing, and marketing. Product development takes months or years to implement properly because marketers and analysts watch market trends over time to determine whether a product is satisfying a consumer need or want.

What is the difference between Product Development vs Product Management?

AspectProduct DevelopmentProduct Management
Primary FocusDesigning, creating, and building productsStrategizing, planning, and overseeing product lifecycle
Required SkillsTechnical skills, engineering, designMarket research, communication, leadership
Work EnvironmentEngineering teams, R&D, technical departmentsCross-functional teams, executive meetings
Common CertificationsEngineering degrees, technical certificationsProduct management certifications (e.g., PMP, Scrum)

Product Development focuses on creating and building products, involving technical and engineering tasks. Product Management involves strategizing, planning, and guiding the product's lifecycle, requiring strong market and leadership skills. While they collaborate closely, their core responsibilities differ: one builds, the other manages the product's success.

What are some common challenges faced by professionals in product development, and how can they be addressed?

Product Development professionals often encounter challenges such as balancing customer needs with technical feasibility, managing cross-functional team communication, and meeting tight deadlines. Navigating these issues typically involves clear prioritization, regular stakeholder check-ins, and fostering a collaborative environment with engineering, design, and marketing teams. Utilizing agile methodologies and maintaining open feedback channels can also help streamline processes and ensure alignment on project goals.

What are the key skills and qualifications needed to thrive in product development, and why are they important?

To thrive in Product Development, you need expertise in market research, project management, and product lifecycle understanding, often supported by a degree in engineering, business, or a related field. Familiarity with tools like Agile software, prototyping platforms, and product management systems (e.g., Jira, Trello) is typically required. Creativity, strong communication, and cross-functional collaboration are crucial soft skills for success in this role. These competencies ensure the creation of innovative, user-centric products that successfully reach the market and meet business goals.

Is product development a good career?

Product development is a viable career that involves designing, creating, and improving products, often requiring skills in project management, design, and technical tools. It offers opportunities across various industries and can lead to roles in management or specialized technical fields, with a focus on innovation and problem-solving.

How much do product developers get paid?

Product developers typically earn a median annual salary of around $85,000, with salaries ranging from approximately $60,000 to over $120,000 depending on experience, location, and industry. Entry-level positions generally start lower, while experienced developers or those in senior roles can earn significantly more, especially with specialized skills or certifications.

What is product development?

Product development is the process of creating new products or improving existing ones to meet customer needs and business goals. It involves several stages, including idea generation, market research, design, prototyping, testing, and launching the product to the market. Product development often requires cross-functional collaboration between teams like marketing, engineering, design, and manufacturing. The goal is to deliver a product that provides value to customers and stands out in the marketplace.

What are the most commonly searched types of Product Development jobs in San Rafael, CA?

The most popular types of Product Development jobs in San Rafael, CA are:

What job categories do people searching Product Development jobs in San Rafael, CA look for?

The top searched job categories for Product Development jobs in San Rafael, CA are:

What cities near San Rafael, CA are hiring for Product Development jobs?

Cities near San Rafael, CA with the most Product Development job openings:

Infographic showing various Product Development job openings in San Rafael, CA as of August 2026, with employment types broken down into 1% As Needed, 77% Full Time, 20% Part Time, and 2% Contract. Highlights an 91% Physical, 3% Hybrid, and 6% Remote job distribution, with an average salary of $141,554 per year, or $68.1 per hour.

Product Manager, Scientific Development Solutions

Benchling

San Francisco, CA โ€ข On-site

$163K - $221K/yr

Full-time

Posted 23 days ago


Job description

We are rebuilding biotech for the AI era.
When a breakthrough is delayed, the world waits. Getting a molecule from discovery to patients, or a crop from lab to field, involves thousands of slow, manual, disconnected steps. AI has the potential to change this, compressing decades of R&D work into years. But that only happens when clean, structured scientific data and AI are built into how science gets done.
Benchling is the AI platform for biotech R&D. Scientists use Benchling to design experiments, capture structured data, and run AI agents and models directly in their workflows. Over 200,000 scientists around the world trust Benchling to power their most important work, from academic labs to Sanofi, Moderna, and more than half of the world's top 50 biopharma.
We're building an AI scientist for our customers. We can't do that if we haven't built the muscle ourselves. AI fluency is the foundation we build on; it's core to how we work, and we're committed to helping every new hire integrate it into their day-to-day. As part of our interview process, you'll complete a brief AI-focused exercise or discussion so we can understand how you think about and use AI to drive impact in your role. Feel free to reference any tools, platforms, or workflows you use today.
ROLE OVERVIEW
Benchling's platform helps the world's largest biotech and pharma companies develop therapies faster. As a Product Manager on the Scientific Development Solutions team, you'll work on products such as Recipes, Assays, and Workflows that scientists use to do their jobs. These products are fundamental to how scientific processes get configured, run, and tracked across different phases of a drug's development cycle.
We launched Bioprocess in 2024 to help process development teams design, execute, and analyze the experiments that turn a molecule into a manufacturable drug. In 2025, we announced a partnership with Merck (press release) to help their teams develop and test vaccines faster by bringing their analytical workflows onto a single platform.
Today, we're implementing the largest pharma companies in the world on Bioprocess, making the core product better every quarter, and expanding into Analytical Sciences and downstream QC. Our vision is to become the software that helps biopharmas bring therapies to patients twice as fast.
This is a systems design problem disguised as a life sciences product. You'll be working at the intersection of complex configuration, workflow orchestration, and behavior change. You'll figure out how to make powerful software feel intuitive to the scientists who depend on it every day.
You do not need a life sciences background. We're looking for a systems thinker with product taste who can walk into an unfamiliar domain, find the structural patterns, and be effective quickly. The best PMs we've seen for this kind of work have diverse backgrounds. They've built products across meaningfully different problem spaces and bring transferable instincts rather than a single industry playbook.
RESPONSIBILITIES
  • You are responsible for Recipes, Assays, and Workflows. That means you and your team decide what gets built, why, and in what order. You're accountable for the roadmap and the outcomes your roadmap produces.
  • To inform what you build, you will spend time with customers and GTM teams to understand how scientists actually work, and how to turn what they ask for into what they need. It's your responsibility to bring that context back to the team and turn it into product direction.
  • You'll work alongside design, engineering, GTM, and our customers to build and ship products. That means guiding product decisions with design and engineering, validating ideas early with customers, enabling customer experience teams on what you ship, and partnering with GTM to bring it to market.
  • Use tools at your disposal (SQL, AI, developer environment) to be more effective. That can mean pulling your own data to answer a question, building a prototype to clarify direction, or finding a way to find and summarize customer discovery notes. The point isn't the specific tool. It's the drive to find what you need and move fast rather than wait for someone else.
QUALIFICATIONS
  • 3-5+ years of product management or equivalent experience
  • A diverse career history. You've worked across 2-3+ meaningfully different domains or product types. This is the single strongest signal we're looking for. It tells us you're a systems thinker who adapts, not someone who relies on one playbook.
  • Product taste. You have a track record of building and improving products. You can translate a user requirement into a feature worth building, and you can look at any product and articulate what's broken and why. You understand that shipping software isn't just about delivering requirements. It's about getting a user to change their behavior, form a new habit, and make it stick.
  • Architectural fluency. You have experience guiding the architectural decisions of a product. You can reason about data models, state machines, or schema design. You don't write code, but you can spot when a technical decision will create a bad user experience, limit the extensibility of a product, or lead to something that's difficult to revert.
  • Technical tool competency. You're resourceful. You use tools to help yourself and your team get work done, whether that's writing SQL queries to make data-driven decisions, using design tools to create prototypes, or using something like Cursor to ship product improvements directly.
  • Clear communication. You can lead an engaging professional conversation and keep a room's attention. You know how to adapt your communication style based on your audience and can read and respond to the individuals in the conversation. As a PM, this matters almost more than anything else.
  • Track record of outcomes. You've stayed long enough at key roles to ship, learn, and speak to what worked and what didn't. We're looking for evidence of impact.
  • Intellectual range. You're genuinely curious, and that curiosity shows up in how you learn and think about problems. Product management is a means to an end. It's how you apply the learnings from the curiosity that has driven you. What you and your team decide to build is an inevitable conclusion of that curiosity.

BONUS
  • Experience in regulated or compliance-heavy industries (doesn't have to be life sciences)
  • Configuration-heavy, platform-style products
  • B2B SaaS in the growth/scaling stage
  • Prior life as an engineer, data scientist, or solutions consultant

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).
#LI-Hybrid #KW-1
#BI-Hybrid #KW-1
#LI-KW-1
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.