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Associate Director, Service Engineering

Natera· Product Engineering & Service
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Austin, TXPosted 3w ago

About the role

Leads reliability, availability, and operational excellence of lab-facing platforms, ensuring clinical systems, laboratory workflows, and data pipelines operate with high reliability, scalability, and regulatory compliance in a healthcare environment.

Responsibilities

  • Lead, mentor, and scale a team of Service Engineers / SREs supporting clinical production systems
  • Establish 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

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

Skills

Required:Leadership and team managementIncident managementSite reliability engineering (SRE)CMMS and LIMS

Benefits

  • Competitive Benefits - comprehensive medical, dental, vision, life and disability plans for eligible employees and dependents
  • Free testing for employees and immediate family, fertility care benefits
  • Pregnancy and baby bonding leave, 401k benefits, commuter benefits, and other benefits
  • Generous employee referral program
Last updated Oct 1, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Natera

A global leader in cfDNA testing

Dedicated to oncology, women’s health, and organ health. Natera’s cell-free DNA tests help protect health and inform more personalized decisions about care.

oncologywomen's healthorgan healthcell-free DNA
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