Associate Director, Service Engineering

Natera•Austin, TX

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.

Requirements

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

Nice To Haves

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

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