Associate Director, Service Eng

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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.

• 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
• 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
• 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
• Act as the 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
• 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 range: $160,500—$200,600 USD
• Annual performance incentive bonus
• Long‑term equity awards
• Comprehensive health benefits (medical, dental, vision)
• 401(k) with company match
• Generous paid time off and company holidays
• Additional wellness and work‑life benefits

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.

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.

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…