OverviewThe 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 ResponsibilitiesLeadership & 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
