How to Apply to Bentley Systems

12 min read Last updated April 20, 2026 7 open positions
Blake Crosley
Blake Crosley Researched using publicly available information, hiring data, and ATS analysis.

Key Takeaways

  • Bentley Systems is a Pennsylvania-headquartered infrastructure engineering software company (NASDAQ: BSY), distinct from Bentley Motors and quietly powering most of the world's major civil infrastructure programs.
  • The careers experience runs on SAP SuccessFactors at jobs.bentley.com, despite some external sources labeling the company a Workday shop. Optimize your resume and profile for SuccessFactors specifically.
  • Nicholas Cumins (formerly COO of Industrial Automation at Schneider Electric) became CEO on July 1, 2024 — the first non-family CEO ever — and is accelerating the shift to subscription, cloud, and the iTwin Platform.
  • Roughly 5,500 colleagues across 50+ countries, with major hubs in Philadelphia/Exton PA, Pune India, Dublin Ireland, Vilnius Lithuania, and Sydney Australia. Approximately $1.3B annual revenue.
  • Hiring is heavy in C++ (legacy MicroStation), TypeScript/.NET/Azure (iTwin), product management (especially civil-engineering-fluent), technical sales to AECO accounts, and global customer success.
  • Tenure is unusually long, layoffs are unusually rare, and the cultural temperature is more 'serious engineering firm' than 'consumer tech startup'. Plan your interview narrative accordingly.
  • Compensation is market-competitive in base salary and BSY equity but rarely top-of-market in cash; the offer wins on stability, scope, and infrastructure-mission seriousness.

About Bentley Systems

Bentley Systems, Incorporated is a publicly traded American software company (NASDAQ: BSY) that builds the engineering software the world's roads, bridges, rail networks, water utilities, power grids, mines, and commercial buildings are designed and operated with. Founded in 1984 by brothers Keith and Barry Bentley, the company grew quietly for almost forty years as a family-controlled business serving the AECO industry — Architecture, Engineering, Construction, and Owner-Operators — before going public in September 2020. Today Bentley employs roughly 5,500 colleagues across more than 50 countries and generates approximately $1.3 billion in annual revenue, with the Bentley family retaining majority voting control even after the IPO. The product portfolio is the easiest way to understand what Bentley actually does. MicroStation is the company's flagship CAD platform, a direct competitor to Autodesk's AutoCAD that has been continuously developed since 1986 and remains the drafting environment of choice for many transportation, civil, and plant engineering firms. ProjectWise is the collaborative work environment that lets distributed engineering teams co-author huge model files without stepping on each other. The OpenX family — OpenRoads, OpenBridge, OpenBuildings, OpenRail, OpenSite, OpenPlant — are discipline-specific BIM applications built on top of MicroStation for designing the actual infrastructure. AssetWise handles asset performance management for the operators who run that infrastructure once it's built. Seequent, acquired in 2021 for $1.05 billion, brings geosciences and subsurface modeling. And the iTwin Platform, launched in 2018 and aggressively expanded ever since, is Bentley's bet on infrastructure digital twins — cloud-native services that fuse design models, reality capture, IoT data, and analytics into a single living representation of a physical asset. Bentley is headquartered in suburban Philadelphia. The company spent decades at 685 Stockton Drive in Exton, Pennsylvania, and Exton remains a major office, but Bentley relocated its global headquarters to 1700 Market Street in Center City Philadelphia in 2022 to anchor itself in a more urban, tech-forward labor market. Important to note for anyone Googling: Bentley Systems has nothing to do with Bentley Motors, the British luxury automaker now owned by Volkswagen. The two companies share only a name. Bentley Systems' work is decidedly less glamorous and arguably more consequential — every major infrastructure program in the US, UK, India, China, and the Middle East almost certainly runs on Bentley software somewhere in its design or operations stack. The most important recent change for any candidate to understand is the leadership transition. Greg Bentley, one of the founding brothers, served as CEO for 24 years before stepping into the role of Executive Chair on July 1, 2024. He was succeeded by Nicholas Cumins, an external hire from Schneider Electric where he had been Chief Operating Officer of the Industrial Automation business. Cumins is the first non-family CEO in Bentley's history, and he was deliberately selected to accelerate the company's transformation from a perpetual-license desktop software vendor into a cloud-and-subscription SaaS business centered on the iTwin Platform. If you are interviewing at Bentley in 2026, you are interviewing into a company in the middle of a generational pivot — older C++ codebases that ship in MicroStation are still mission-critical, but new investment is overwhelmingly flowing into TypeScript, .NET, Azure, and the iTwin services stack. Both worlds coexist, and candidates who can speak fluently to either will find a home.

Application Process

  1. 1
    Start at https://www

    Start at https://www.bentley.com/company/careers/. The careers landing page is content-marketing oriented (culture, values, locations, employee stories) and does not host the actual req list.

  2. 2
    Click the 'Browse all Jobs' button

    Click the 'Browse all Jobs' button. You will be redirected to https://jobs.bentley.com/search, which is Bentley's white-labeled SuccessFactors career site. The branded URL hides the underlying career4.successfactors.com infrastructure but the application experience is standard SAP SuccessFactors throughout.

  3. 3
    Filter by keyword, location, or job family

    Filter by keyword, location, or job family. SuccessFactors at Bentley exposes filters for country, state/province, city, job category (Software Engineering, Sales, Marketing, Product Management, etc.), and posting date. There are typically 130 to 200 open requisitions worldwide at any given time.

  4. 4
    Create a candidate profile before applying

    Create a candidate profile before applying. SuccessFactors will not let you submit without an account. The profile builder will pre-parse an uploaded resume into structured fields — review every parsed field carefully because the parser frequently mangles dates, employer names, and section ordering. What gets stored is what recruiters see, not the original PDF.

  5. 5
    Upload a resume in PDF or Word format

    Upload a resume in PDF or Word format. Keep filenames professional (firstname_lastname_resume.pdf) and avoid graphics-heavy templates, multi-column layouts, headers and footers, or text inside images — SAP's parser is conservative and will silently drop content it cannot read in a single linear flow.

  6. 6
    Answer pre-screening questionnaires honestly

    Answer pre-screening questionnaires honestly. Most Bentley reqs include a short set of knockout questions covering work authorization for the role's country, willingness to relocate, salary expectations (US roles often), and required years of experience with named technologies. For technical sales roles you will be asked about prior experience selling to AECO, civil engineering, or owner-operator accounts.

  7. 7
    Expect an acknowledgment email within 24 hours and a recruiter screen within 1 t

    Expect an acknowledgment email within 24 hours and a recruiter screen within 1 to 3 weeks for active reqs. Bentley's talent acquisition team is regionally distributed (Exton/Philadelphia, Pune, Dublin, Sydney, Vilnius), and response time correlates strongly with the hiring location.

  8. 8
    If you do not hear back within 4 weeks, the role is most likely on hold or has b

    If you do not hear back within 4 weeks, the role is most likely on hold or has been filled internally. Bentley does not aggressively close out reqs in SuccessFactors, so a job appearing 'open' for months is not always an actionable signal. A recruiter's silence usually means no.

  9. 9
    For specialized roles

    For specialized roles — particularly product management for a specific OpenX product or principal engineer roles on iTwin — candidates with directly relevant industry contacts often have more luck reaching out to a hiring manager on LinkedIn after applying through SuccessFactors. Bentley's culture rewards initiative and there is no policy against polite outreach.

Resume Tips for Bentley Systems

recommended

Lead with infrastructure and AECO domain signals if you have them

Lead with infrastructure and AECO domain signals if you have them. Bentley screens hard for candidates who already understand the customers — DOT contracts, design-build delivery, BIM mandates, ISO 19650, owner-operator workflows. A line like 'Built CAD plug-in adopted by 14 state DOTs' will outrank a longer list of generic backend metrics.

recommended

Distinguish C++ desktop experience from cloud-native experience explicitly

Distinguish C++ desktop experience from cloud-native experience explicitly. Bentley still maintains one of the largest active C++ codebases in commercial software (MicroStation has been continuously developed since the 1980s) and recruiters specifically search for C++, MFC, ATL, and graphics programming keywords. Separate these from any TypeScript, React, .NET 8, or Azure work so the recruiter can route you to the right team.

recommended

Name the iTwin Platform if you have any experience with it

Name the iTwin Platform if you have any experience with it. iTwin.js, iTwin Synchronizer, iModelHub, and the iTwin Viewer are all open-source or freely available, and a public GitHub repo demonstrating an iTwin integration will move your resume to the top of any iTwin-related req almost automatically.

recommended

Quantify infrastructure scale, not user counts

Quantify infrastructure scale, not user counts. SaaS-style metrics ('served 1M MAU') matter less here than infrastructure-style metrics ('processed 4TB reality mesh', 'managed 80,000 design files in ProjectWise', 'designed alignment for 220km rail corridor'). Bentley's reviewers think in cubic meters of concrete, not DAU.

recommended

For technical sales roles, make the buyer journey explicit

For technical sales roles, make the buyer journey explicit. State the size and type of accounts you sold into (Top 5 ENR engineering firm, Tier 1 EPC, state DOT, federal owner), the dollar values of deals closed, and your degree of technical depth. Bentley's account advancement model expects sales engineers and account managers who can credibly debate a discipline lead, not just deliver a slide deck.

recommended

List civil, structural, mechanical, or geotechnical engineering credentials prom

List civil, structural, mechanical, or geotechnical engineering credentials prominently if you hold them. PE, CEng, EIT, RICS, and equivalent professional licenses are genuinely valued for product management, customer success, and pre-sales roles even when not strictly required. A licensed civil engineer who can write Python is a unicorn at Bentley and will be treated as such.

recommended

Use US English spellings and the standard reverse-chronological format for the S

Use US English spellings and the standard reverse-chronological format for the SuccessFactors parser. Avoid two-column layouts, side bars, color blocks, embedded icons, and SVG graphics. The parser will linearize everything; if your design relies on visual structure, the recruiter will see scrambled output.

recommended

Keep total length to one page for under five years of experience and two pages o

Keep total length to one page for under five years of experience and two pages otherwise. Bentley recruiters explicitly screen for clarity and concision; a sprawling five-page CV from a senior candidate is read as a signal of poor judgment about what matters.

recommended

Mirror the language of the job description, especially the named technologies an

Mirror the language of the job description, especially the named technologies and named products. SuccessFactors keyword matching at Bentley appears to weight exact phrase matches heavily — 'OpenRoads Designer' will hit where 'roads design software' will not, and 'Azure Kubernetes Service' will hit where 'container orchestration' will not.

recommended

Include a brief professional summary at the top that names the team or product f

Include a brief professional summary at the top that names the team or product family you want to join. 'Cloud platform engineer targeting iTwin Platform' or 'Civil engineer with 8 years of OpenRoads production experience seeking product management role' tells the recruiter exactly which req queue to drop you into.

ATS System: SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting (white-labeled at jobs.bentley.com)

Bentley Systems uses SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting Management as its applicant tracking system. The candidate-facing surface lives at jobs.bentley.com but the underlying infrastructure is the standard career4.successfactors.com SuccessFactors instance, with all the well-known characteristics of that platform: a moderately strict resume parser, mandatory candidate profile creation, structured pre-screening questionnaires, and recruiter dashboards built around tag-and-rank workflows. Despite Bentley's registry data sometimes labeling the company as a Workday shop, the live careers experience is and has been SuccessFactors throughout the Cumins-era cloud transition.

  • Submit a single-column PDF with text-selectable content. SuccessFactors' resume parser handles linear PDFs reliably; it mangles two-column designs, headers/footers, and any text rendered as an image inside the PDF.
  • Always review and correct the parsed profile fields before submitting. Whatever appears in the profile builder is what reaches the recruiter — the original resume is attached but is rarely the screening artifact of first resort.
  • Use plain section headings the parser knows: 'Experience', 'Education', 'Skills', 'Certifications'. Creative section names ('Career Adventures', 'Skill Constellation') get categorized as 'Other' or dropped entirely.
  • List dates in MM/YYYY format (e.g., 03/2021 – Present). SuccessFactors at Bentley normalizes well to this format and chokes on free-text date strings like 'Spring of 2021' or 'Three years'.
  • Save your candidate profile and answers — Bentley reuses one SuccessFactors tenant globally, so applying to a future role at any Bentley office in any country is a one-click affair if your profile is in good shape.
  • Set up job alerts in your candidate profile. SuccessFactors sends fairly clean alert emails when reqs matching saved searches go live, and many Bentley roles get filled within the first two weeks of posting.
  • Note that very long applications (covering 6+ Bentley reqs in a short window) can occasionally trigger anti-spam throttling on the SuccessFactors side. Apply deliberately to roles you genuinely fit, not in bulk.

Interview Culture

Bentley Systems' interview process in the Cumins era is best described as 'modern SaaS standard with engineering-firm seriousness'.

Expect four to five rounds depending on level and function. The funnel typically opens with a 30-minute recruiter screen covering work authorization, location, motivation, and salary range. The second round is a hiring manager conversation focused on fit with the specific team — for engineering roles this is also where the manager probes your technology stack depth (C++/.NET/TypeScript/Azure depending on the team) and your familiarity with the product family. Rounds three and four are typically a combination of technical deep dives, system design or architecture discussions for senior engineers, and a panel interview with two to four cross-functional colleagues — usually a peer engineer, a product manager, and a senior technical leader. For staff and principal engineering roles a final 'colleague chat' with a director or VP is common, and for product management or technical sales roles you will often be asked to deliver a short presentation: a product strategy, a customer-account approach, or a technical demo of something you have built. The cultural texture is genuinely different from a pure consumer-tech company. Bentley's people skew older, more technical, and more domain-loyal than at a Silicon Valley startup. Many colleagues have 15-plus year tenures, came from civil or mechanical engineering backgrounds before moving into software, and care deeply about the actual infrastructure outcomes their software enables. Conversations often turn to specific projects — a metro line in Riyadh, a flood model in Bangladesh, a wind farm in the North Sea — and candidates who can engage with that domain authentically stand out. The company is family-controlled and that shows: there is less performative urgency than at a venture-backed peer, decisions can be slow, and political caution is rewarded over public risk-taking. At the same time, the Cumins transition has injected real cloud-product discipline — sprint cadence, OKRs, platform thinking, design partner programs — and the iTwin organization in particular operates much more like a modern SaaS team than the legacy MicroStation business does. Compensation is generally market-competitive but rarely top-of-market. Base salaries in Philadelphia, London, and Dublin are aligned with regional tech medians; Pune and Vilnius pay strong local-market rates. Equity comes in the form of NASDAQ-listed BSY stock through RSU grants, with new-hire grants typical for senior individual contributors and above. Bentley's 'colleague success program' includes stock purchase, fitness/wellness, parental leave, and explicit support for community service hours. Where Bentley wins on offer is consistency: the company famously avoids both boom hiring and mass layoffs, which has produced one of the most stable engineering tenures in commercial software. Where it loses is on cash and signing bonuses, which trail what a comparable role at a hyperscaler or major cloud SaaS vendor would offer.

What Bentley Systems Looks For

  • Genuine interest in infrastructure and the AECO industry — candidates who can talk credibly about how civil engineering firms, contractors, or owner-operators actually work.
  • Deep technical specialization rather than broad-but-shallow generalism. Bentley would rather hire a great C++ graphics engineer or a great TypeScript cloud engineer than a competent both-handed developer.
  • Comfort working across a multi-decade codebase. Anyone joining engineering should expect to read code that was first written in the 1990s alongside code that shipped last quarter.
  • Long-term tenure orientation. The company is family-controlled with low turnover; candidates who appear to be career-hopping every 18 months are screened out for senior roles.
  • Cross-cultural collaboration skills. Bentley's engineering organization is genuinely global with major hubs in Pennsylvania, Pune, Dublin, Vilnius, and Sydney, and most teams are distributed across at least three time zones.
  • Customer empathy for the engineering professional as the end user. Bentley's customers are themselves engineers — pleasing them requires the kind of respect for craft that Bentley itself was built on.
  • Demonstrated ability to ship cloud-native software for product, platform, and SRE roles tied to the iTwin Platform — Azure, Kubernetes, microservices, observability.
  • For technical sales: a track record of complex enterprise sales cycles measured in quarters or years, not weeks, and the technical depth to demo product credibly to a hostile audience of senior engineers.
  • For product management: strong opinions about workflow, weakly held — and ideally a civil, structural, geotechnical, or transportation engineering background to underpin those opinions.
  • Comfort with an environment that values quiet competence more than self-promotion. Bentley colleagues are not loud. The interview is partly a screen for fit with that tone.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Bentley Systems related to Bentley Motors, the luxury car company?
No. Bentley Systems and Bentley Motors share only a name. Bentley Systems is an American infrastructure engineering software company founded in Pennsylvania in 1984 by Keith and Barry Bentley. Bentley Motors is a British luxury automaker founded in 1919 by Walter Owen Bentley and now owned by Volkswagen Group. The two companies have no corporate, financial, or family relationship.
Where is Bentley Systems headquartered?
Bentley Systems is headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at 1700 Market Street. The company spent decades at its longtime Exton, Pennsylvania campus at 685 Stockton Drive, which remains a major engineering office, before relocating its global headquarters to Center City Philadelphia in 2022. Both Philadelphia and Exton are listed as primary US locations on most reqs.
What ATS does Bentley Systems use?
Bentley Systems uses SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting Management. The candidate-facing portal is white-labeled at jobs.bentley.com, with the underlying infrastructure on career4.successfactors.com. All applications, profile management, pre-screening questionnaires, and recruiter workflows run through SuccessFactors globally. There is no Greenhouse, Lever, Workday, or Ashby pathway — every applicant goes through the same SuccessFactors funnel regardless of country or role.
Who is the CEO of Bentley Systems and when did the leadership change?
Nicholas Cumins has been CEO of Bentley Systems since July 1, 2024. He succeeded Greg Bentley, one of the founding brothers, who served as CEO for 24 years and now serves as Executive Chair. Cumins joined from Schneider Electric, where he was Chief Operating Officer of the Industrial Automation business, and he is the first non-family CEO in Bentley's history.
What technologies does Bentley Systems hire for?
Two distinct stacks. The legacy MicroStation, ProjectWise, and OpenX desktop product lines are heavy on C++, MFC, .NET Framework, and graphics programming, with continuous active development that has been ongoing since the mid-1980s. The iTwin Platform and modern cloud services are heavy on TypeScript, Node.js, .NET (modern), C#, Azure, Kubernetes, microservices, and React. Site reliability, security, and platform engineering roles span both. A meaningful portion of new requisitions sit cleanly in one stack or the other; few cross-cut both, so candidates can specialize.
Is Bentley Systems a good place to work for someone early in their career?
Yes, particularly for engineers who want to ship software with real-world infrastructure consequences and learn alongside long-tenured senior colleagues. Bentley runs structured internship and graduate programs out of Pune, Exton, Dublin, and Vilnius, and the development culture rewards depth and patience over flashy short-term output. Tradeoffs: cash compensation trails hyperscaler offers, and the pace can feel slower than at a consumer-tech startup.
Does Bentley Systems hire remote workers?
Selectively. Many engineering, product, and account-facing roles are listed as 'Hybrid' tied to a named office (Philadelphia, Exton, Pune, Dublin, Vilnius, Sydney, London). A smaller subset, often labeled 'Remote, [State], US' or 'Remote, [Country]', are fully remote within the country. Fully remote roles cross-border are rare. The SuccessFactors location filter at jobs.bentley.com is the most reliable signal of what is and is not remote-eligible at any given moment.
How long does the Bentley Systems interview process typically take?
Plan for four to eight weeks from application to offer for engineering and product roles, assuming the req is fully active. The recruiter screen typically lands within one to three weeks of application; from the hiring manager screen to the on-site or virtual on-site is usually two to three weeks; offer extension and negotiation runs another one to two weeks. Senior individual contributor and people-manager roles can run longer, particularly if a portfolio review or panel presentation is involved.
What is the iTwin Platform and why does it keep coming up in interviews?
iTwin Platform is Bentley's cloud-native infrastructure digital twin offering — a set of services that ingest design models, reality capture (drone, lidar, photogrammetry), IoT telemetry, and analytics, then expose them through APIs and viewers as a living digital representation of a physical asset. It has been the central strategic bet of the company since 2018 and is the area receiving the largest share of new investment under CEO Nicholas Cumins. Almost every modern engineering, product, and sales role at Bentley touches iTwin in some way; familiarity with the open-source iTwin.js library or the iTwin Viewer is a meaningful interview advantage.
Does Bentley sponsor work visas in the United States?
Yes for specific roles, but selectively. Bentley sponsors H-1B, TN, and certain L-1 transfers for senior engineering, product, and specialized technical roles where the talent pool is constrained. Sponsorship is rarer for entry-level and customer-facing roles. The SuccessFactors application form will ask explicitly about work authorization and sponsorship needs; answering honestly does not disqualify you for senior reqs, but it is decisive for many junior ones.
What is the company culture like under Nicholas Cumins compared to the Greg Bentley era?
More cloud-product discipline, more measurable execution rhythm, slightly more of a SaaS-company tempo — but the underlying engineering-firm seriousness, low-turnover loyalty, and infrastructure-mission identity remain intact. Cumins arrived from Schneider Electric with a mandate to accelerate the shift to subscription and cloud, and the iTwin organization in particular has visibly tightened its sprint cadence, OKR practice, and platform thinking. The legacy MicroStation business and the wider colleague culture remain recognizably Bentley: quietly competent, technically deep, low on performative urgency.

Open Positions

Bentley Systems currently has 7 open positions.

Check Your Resume Before Applying → View 7 open positions at Bentley Systems

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Sources

  1. Bentley Systems Careers —
  2. Bentley Systems Job Search (SuccessFactors) —
  3. Bentley Systems Investor Relations —
  4. Bentley Systems Announces Nicholas Cumins as CEO Successor to Greg Bentley —
  5. Bentley Systems Annual Report (Form 10-K) —
  6. iTwin Platform - Bentley Infrastructure Digital Twins —
  7. MicroStation Product Page —
  8. Bentley Acquires Seequent for $1.05 Billion —
  9. Bentley Systems Profile on NASDAQ (BSY) —
  10. Bentley Systems Headquarters - 1700 Market Street, Philadelphia —