Associate Director, Service Eng
About The Position
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.
Responsibilities
- 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
Benefits
- 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
- 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!
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Director
Education Level
No Education Listed
Number of Employees
1,001-5,000 employees
