Associate Director, Service Engineering

Natera; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Natera is seeking an Associate Director of Service Engineering to lead the reliability and operational excellence of lab-facing platforms. You will manage a team of Service Engineers/SREs, drive on-call readiness, and partner with Lab Ops, Bioinformatics, and Compliance to support mission-critical clinical production systems.

The role emphasizes regulatory compliance, scalable infrastructure, and reducing operational toil through automation, with a strong focus on patient impact and system

Qualifications

• 8+ years in service engineering or 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 communication skills, especially in high-stakes situations.

Responsibilities

• Lead a team of Service Engineers / SREs supporting clinical production systems.
• Own reliability and availability for production services supporting laboratory operations, reporting, and customer delivery.
• Define and manage SLAs, SLOs, and 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 Lab Operations, Bioinformatics, Engineering and Development to translate needs into reliability requirements.
• Ensure systems meet healthcare and regulatory requirements (HIPAA, CLIA, CAP, SOX) and support audits.

Skills

People management

Incident management

Production systems operation

Communication skills

Regulatory awareness

Tools

CMMS

LIMS

Job description

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.

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 environmentsStrong 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!

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.

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.

Voluntary Self-Identification

For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey.Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiringprocess or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in aconfidential file.

As set forth in Natera’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy,we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

A \"disabled veteran\" is one of the following: a veteran of the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service who is entitled to compensation (or who but for the receipt of military retired pay would be entitled to compensation) under laws administered by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs; or a person who was discharged or released from active duty because of a service-connected disability.

A \"recently separated veteran\" means any veteran during the three-year period beginning on the date of such veteran's discharge or release from active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval, or air service.

An \"active duty wartime or campaign badge veteran\" means a veteran who served on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service during a war, or in a campaign or expedition for which a campaign badge has been authorized under the laws administered by the Department of Defense.

An \"Armed forces service medal veteran\" means a veteran who, while serving on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service, participated in a United States military operation for which an Armed Forces service medal was awarded pursuant to Executive Order 12985.