Natera - Manager, Platform Engineering

• As the Manager of Platform Engineering, you will lead the backbone of Natera’s infrastructure. You aren’t just managing a team, you are the Product Manager of our Cloud Ecosystem. You will oversee three critical high-performing workstreams: Cloud Engineering, Orchestration and Kafka, consisting of several elite engineers, including Staff-level experts. • At Natera, we don't just "provide infrastructure", we build an AI-native Internal Developer Platform (IDP). Your mission is to ensure that our cloud environment doesn't just support workloads, but makes deploying and scaling them effortless for every engineering team in the company. • AI-native Internal Developer Platform (IDP) • We operate with a "Platform as a Product" philosophy. This means you will treat our internal developers as customers, seeking to understand their friction points and delivering a seamless, self-service experience that balances speed with enterprise-grade guardrails. Reporting directly to the Director of Platform Engineering, you will have the autonomy to define the roadmap, align stakeholders across the organization, and lead your team to execute on a vision that directly impacts Natera’s ability to innovate at scale. • "Platform as a Product" • Strategic Platform Leadership: 8+ years of experience in Cloud, Platform, or Infrastructure Engineering, with at least 2-3 years in a leadership role managing high-performing teams. • Strategic Platform Leadership: • The "Product" Mindset: A proven track record of treating infrastructure as a product. You have experience conducting internal user research, defining service-level objectives (SLOs), and building self-service tools that developers actually want to use. • The "Product" Mindset: • Technical Authority: Deep, "under-the-hood" expertise in AWS, Kubernetes, and Terraform. You should be comfortable acting as a technical peer and mentor to your engineers. • Technical Authority: • Event-Driven Architecture: Expert-level knowledge of Kafka/MSK and orchestration services. You understand how to scale high-throughput streaming data for mission-critical applications. • Event-Driven Architecture: • AI-Native Operations: Practical experience or a deep understanding of applying AI techniques, such as RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), agentic reasoning, or LLM-driven automation, to streamline operational workflows and platform governance. • AI-Native Operations: • Autonomous Execution: You are self-sufficient, comfortable with ambiguity, and capable of building a roadmap from scratch while keeping stakeholders aligned. • Autonomous Execution: • Exceptional Communication: You are a "creative evangelist" who can translate complex infrastructure roadmaps into clear business value for executive leadership and drive organic adoption across the engineering organization. • Exceptional Communication: • The pay range is listed and actual compensation packages are based on a wide array of factors unique to each candidate, including but not limited to skill set, years & depth of experience, certifications and specific office location. This may differ in other locations due to cost of labor considerations. • $138,700 - $173,350 USD • OUR OPPORTUNITY • OUR OPPORTUNITY • Natera™ is a global leader in cell-free DNA (cfDNA) testing, dedicated to oncology, women’s health, and organ health. Our aim is to make personalized genetic testing and diagnostics part of the standard of care to protect health and enable earlier and more targeted interventions that lead to longer, healthier lives. • The Natera team consists of highly dedicated statisticians, geneticists, doctors, laboratory scientists, business professionals, software engineers and many other professionals from world-class institutions, who care deeply for our work and each other. When you join Natera, you’ll work hard and grow quickly. Working alongside the elite of the industry, you’ll be stretched and challenged, and take pride in being part of a company that is changing the landscape of genetic disease management.