Overview

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.

Key Responsibilities

Leadership & Team Development

• 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

Service Reliability & Production Operations

• 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

Technical Strategy & Execution

• 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

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• 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

Compliance, Security & Risk Management

• 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

Required 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

Preferred Qualifications

• 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

What Success Looks Like

• 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