Staff Machine Learning Scientist - Translational AI

Staff Machine Learning Scientist - Translational AI

Position Summary

Natera is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Scientist – Translational AI to provide technical leadership at the intersection of biomedical foundation models, computational biology, and clinical translation. This role is responsible for shaping how genomic, pathology and multimodal foundation models are applied to high-impact translational problems, including target identification, drug and biomarker discovery, patient stratification, and therapeutic development.

As a Staff-level scientist, you will operate with broad technical autonomy, influencing modeling strategy across multiple initiatives while remaining hands-on in model development, experimentation, and interpretation. You will work closely with AI scientists, translational scientists, bioinformatics, clinical partners, and ML engineers to ensure foundation models deliver biologically grounded and clinically meaningful insights.

 

 

Key Responsibilities

Scientific Leadership in Translational AI

• Serve as a scientific and technical authority on the application of molecular, genomic and pathology foundation models to translational and clinical questions.
  
  

• Define modeling strategies that bridge pretrained foundation models and downstream translational use cases.
  
  

• Review and elevate modeling approaches used by other scientists through technical feedback and mentorship.
  
  

Foundation Models to Biological & Clinical Translation

• Lead the application and post-training of foundation models (deep sequence, multimodal, representation learning) for biomarker discovery, outcome prediction, molecular recurrence modeling, and therapy response assessment.
  
  

• Design fine-tuning, probing, and representation analysis workflows that extract biologically interpretable signals from large models.
  
  

• Ensure modeling outputs are aligned with biological plausibility, clinical relevance, and downstream decision-making needs.
  
  

Modeling, Experimentation & Evaluation

• Build and evaluate advanced ML models across genomics, transcriptomics, ctDNA, imaging, and clinical metadata.
  
  

• Design clinical investigation and evaluation frameworks that connect model performance to translational utility, robustness, and real-world constraints.
  
  

• Identify failure modes, sources of bias, and uncertainty, and propose mitigation strategies appropriate for clinical-facing applications.
  
  

Cross-Functional Collaboration & Influence

• Partner deeply with translational science, bioinformatics, medical, and clinical teams to frame high-value AI questions.
  
  

• Act as a technical bridge between research, platform, and engineering teams to ensure scalable and reproducible workflows.
  
  

• Contribute to external collaborations and strategic partnerships related to foundation models and translational AI.
  
  

Scientific Communication & External Presence

• Drive scientific storytelling around translational AI efforts through internal reviews, leadership updates, and external-facing materials.
  
  

• Contribute to peer-reviewed publications, conference submissions, and invited talks.
  
  

• Help establish Natera’s external reputation in foundation models for translational medicine.
  
  

Qualifications / Experience

• PhD in Computational Biology, Bioinformatics, Computer Science, or a related quantitative field.
  
  

• 5+ years of experience applying ML to biological, genomic, or clinical data, in the field of oncology, immunology, or translational medicine..
  
  

• Deep experience with foundation models, representation learning, self-supervised learning, or deep sequence models.
  
  

• Demonstrated ability to translate ML outputs into biological insight or clinical value, not just metrics.
  
  

• Strong proficiency in PyTorch and modern ML tooling (e.g., HuggingFace transformers, PEFT, Captum, MLFow).
  
  

• Track record of scientific and technical leadership through project ownership, mentorship, or cross-team influence.
  

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience integrating genomics with imaging or clinical data in multimodal foundation models.
  
  

• Experience with drug discovery, clinical trial data, real-world evidence, or regulatory-facing analyses.
  
  

• Strong publication record in ML, computational biology, or translational research venues.
  
  

 

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.

WHAT WE OFFER

Competitive Benefits - Employee benefits include comprehensive medical, dental, vision, life and disability plans for eligible employees and their dependents. Additionally, Natera employees and their immediate families receive free testing in addition to fertility care benefits. Other benefits include pregnancy and baby bonding leave, 401k benefits, commuter benefits and much more. We also offer a generous employee referral program!

For more information, visit www.natera.com.

Natera is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to ensuring a diverse and inclusive workplace environment, and welcome people of different backgrounds, experiences, abilities and perspectives. Inclusive collaboration benefits our employees, our community and our patients, and is critical to our mission of changing the management of disease worldwide.

All qualified applicants are encouraged to apply, and will be considered without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, age, veteran status, disability or any other legally protected status. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with applicable laws.

If you are based in California, we encourage you to read this important information for California residents. 

Link: https://www.natera.com/notice-of-data-collection-california-residents/

Please be advised that Natera will reach out to candidates with a @natera.com email domain ONLY. Email communications from all other domain names are not from Natera or its employees and are fraudulent. Natera does not request interviews via text messages and does not ask for personal information until a candidate has engaged with the company and has spoken to a recruiter and the hiring team. Natera takes cyber crimes seriously, and will collaborate with law enforcement authorities to prosecute any related cyber crimes.

For more information:
- BBB announcement on job scams 
- FBI Cyber Crime resource page