Head of Lab Service Reliability & Production Ops

Natera; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 180,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

Natera seeks an Associate Director of Service Engineering to lead the reliability, availability, and operational excellence of lab-facing platforms in a regulated healthcare environment.

You will head a team responsible for production stability, incident response, and service health, partnering with Lab Ops, Bioinformatics, Infrastructure, and Compliance to support critical genetic testing and diagnostics.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in service engineering or related engineering roles.
• 5+ years of people management 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.

Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, and scale 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 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.

Skills

Incident management

Root cause analysis

Team leadership

SRE practices

Regulatory compliance

Tools

CMMS

LIMS

Job description

Natera seeks an Associate Director of Service Engineering to lead the reliability, availability, and operational excellence of lab-facing platforms in a regulated healthcare environment.

You will head a team responsible for production stability, incident response, and service health, partnering with Lab Ops, Bioinformatics, Infrastructure, and Compliance to support critical genetic testing and diagnostics.