Associate Director, Service Engineering
Natera · Austin, TX
About this role
**Associate Director, Service Engineering** ## Overview The Associate Director of Service Engineering leads the reliability, availability, and operational excellence of Natera’s lab-facing platforms. This role ensures 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 with 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 a
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