Associate Director of Service Engineering
Leads the reliability, availability, and operational excellence of Natera’s lab-facing platforms. This role ensures that clinical systems, laboratory equipment workflows, and data pipelines operate with high reliability, scalability, and compliance in a regulated healthcare environment.
You will lead a team responsible for production stability, incident response, and service health, partnering closely with Production Engineering, Lab Operations, Bioinformatics, Infrastructure, Facilities, and Compliance to support mission‑critical genetic testing and diagnostics.
Primary Responsibilities
Leadership & Team Development
- Lead, mentor, and scale a team of Service Engineers / SREs supporting clinical production systems
- Establish clear expectations around ownership, on‑call readiness, and operational excellence
- Drive hiring, onboarding, performance management, and career growth
- Foster a blameless, learning‑oriented culture focused on patient impact and reliability
Service Reliability & Production Operations
- Own reliability and availability for production services supporting laboratory operations, reporting, and customer delivery
- Define and manage SLAs, SLOs, and operational KPIs aligned with clinical and business priorities
- Lead major incident response, ensuring rapid triage, clear communication, and thorough post‑incident reviews
- Oversee on‑call rotations, escalation paths, and operational playbooks
- Ensure operational readiness and go‑live support for new assays, pipelines, and platform capabilities
Technical Strategy & Execution
- Partner with Engineering and Development teams to design resilient, fault‑tolerant systems
- Drive best practices for monitoring, alerting, logging, and observability across lab and cloud platforms
- Reduce operational toil through automation, tooling, and process improvements
- Advocate for reliability, performance, and scalability requirements early in the development lifecycle
Cross‑Functional Collaboration
- Act as a primary operational partner to Lab Operations, Bioinformatics, Engineering, and Development
- Translate clinical, regulatory, and operational needs into technical reliability requirements
- Provide clear, executive‑level updates on service health, incidents, and risk mitigation plans
Compliance, Security & Risk Management
- Ensure systems meet healthcare and regulatory requirements (e.g., HIPAA, CLIA, CAP, SOX)
- Partner with Quality and Compliance on audits, access controls, change management, and incident response
- Own disaster recovery, business continuity planning, and periodic testing for critical systems
- Ensure production changes follow validated and compliant release processes
Compensation & Total Rewards
Salary Range: $160,500 – $200,600 USD
Additional Compensation:
- Annual performance incentive bonus
- Long‑term equity awards
- 401(k) with company match
Benefits
- Generous paid time off and company holidays
- Additional wellness and work‑life benefits
- Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, life, and disability plans for employees and dependents
- Free testing and fertility care benefits for employees and immediate families
- Pregnancy and baby bonding leave
- Commuter benefits
- Generous employee referral program
Equal Employment Opportunity
Natera is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to ensuring a diverse and inclusive workplace environment, and welcome people of different backgrounds, experiences, abilities, and perspectives. All qualified applicants are encouraged to apply and will be considered without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, age, veteran status, disability or any other legally protected status. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with applicable laws.
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