Associate Director, Service Engineering

Overview

The 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.

Key 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

Required Qualifications

• 8 years of experience in service engineering, engineering roles
• 5 years of people management experience leading technical teams
• Strong experience operating highly available, mission-critical production systems
• Proven expertise in incident management and root cause analysis
• Hands-on experience with CMMS and LIMs  environments
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, especially in high-stakes situations

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in healthcare, biotech, or other regulated environments
• Familiarity with laboratory information systems (LIMS), data pipelines, or bioinformatics workflows
• Experience with infrastructure and automation tools
• Experience defining SLOs/SLAs for systems with clinical or patient impact

What Success Looks Like

• Reliable, predictable operation of lab-facing systems
• Reduced incident frequency and faster recovery times
• Strong partnership with Lab Ops, Engineering, and Compliance
• A high-performing Service Engineering team that proactively improves system reliability
• Clear visibility into operational risk and service health across Natera platforms

OUR OPPORTUNITY

Natera™ is a global leader in cell-free DNA (cfDNA) testing, dedicated to oncology, women’s health, and organ health. Our aim is to make personalized genetic testing and diagnostics part of the standard of care to protect health and enable earlier and more targeted interventions that lead to longer, healthier lives.

The Natera team consists of highly dedicated statisticians, geneticists, doctors, laboratory scientists, business professionals, software engineers and many other professionals from world-class institutions, who care deeply for our work and each other. When you join Natera, you’ll work hard and grow quickly. Working alongside the elite of the industry, you’ll be stretched and challenged, and take pride in being part of a company that is changing the landscape of genetic disease management.

WHAT WE OFFER

Competitive Benefits - Employee benefits include comprehensive medical, dental, vision, life and disability plans for eligible employees and their dependents. Additionally, Natera employees and their immediate families receive free testing in addition to fertility care benefits. Other benefits include pregnancy and baby bonding leave, 401k benefits, commuter benefits and much more. We also offer a generous employee referral program!

For more information, visit www.natera.com.

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. Inclusive collaboration benefits our employees, our community and our patients, and is critical to our mission of changing the management of disease worldwide.

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.

If you are based in California, we encourage you to read this important information for California residents. 

Link: https://www.natera.com/notice-of-data-collection-california-residents/

Please be advised that Natera will reach out to candidates with a @natera.com email domain ONLY. Email communications from all other domain names are not from Natera or its employees and are fraudulent. Natera does not request interviews via text messages and does not ask for personal information until a candidate has engaged with the company and has spoken to a recruiter and the hiring team. Natera takes cyber crimes seriously, and will collaborate with law enforcement authorities to prosecute any related cyber crimes.

For more information:
- BBB announcement on job scams 
- FBI Cyber Crime resource page