Associate Director, Service Engineering

The Associate Director of Service Engineering leads the reliability availability and operational excellence of Nateras 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 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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 womens 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 youll work hard and grow quickly. Working alongside the elite of the industry youll 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 .

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: be advised that Natera will reach out to candidates with a @ 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