Senior DevOps/SRE Engineer

Overview

Our Engineering team at Natera is dedicated to building fast, reliable, and scalable software, prioritizing ease of testing and deployment. We develop complex cloud-based platforms on Amazon Web Services, including a robust laboratory operations system—featuring LIMS workflows, instrument and sample-tracking services—and an advanced data analytics SaaS platform with AI-powered agentic workloads.

 

We are seeking a highly skilled and motivated Senior DevOps/SRE Engineer to join our distributed engineering team. This role is crucial for establishing and maintaining robust, scalable, and secure development and operations practices across multiple, autonomous product teams. 

 

This position acts as an embedded DevOps/SRE expert and internal consultant, partnering directly with product teams to understand the requirements and coordinate releases, resolve issues, and improve the release process - while aligning with centralized cloud, platform, and security standards. 

 

The ideal candidate will possess deep expertise in cloud infrastructure, automation, CI/CD pipelines, software release management and governance, with a proven ability to enable and coach other teams.

Primary Responsibilities

• Release Management

  • Own the entire Laboratory Operations Software release process execution, ensuring smooth and timely software releases with minimal downtime.

  • Continuously monitor the effectiveness of the release process and implement improvements to increase efficiency, reduce errors, and enhance overall quality.

• DevOps and SRE Enablement

  • Act as an internal consultant and subject matter expert, coaching individual product teams on best-in-class DevOps practices, including infrastructure-as-code (IaC), monitoring, logging, and security integration.

  • Embed with development teams to assess and improve DevOps maturity, delivery practices, and operational readiness.

  • Design and implement a variety of projects to support  extreme growth of complexity of applications as well as to enable innovation.

  • Provide hands-on guidance in CI/CD, cloud infrastructure usage, Kubernetes operations, and observability.

  • Help teams adopt existing infrastructure, platforms, and tooling provided by central Cloud / Platform teams.

• Standards, Guardrails and Governance 

  • Promote and reinforce technical standards, guardrails, and best practices that allow teams to operate autonomously while remaining compliant and secure.

  • Guide teams in applying organizational expectations around reliability, security, and cost management through automation rather than manual controls.

  • Serve as a feedback channel to central platform and cloud teams, sharing adoption challenges and improvement opportunities.

• Automation and Delivery

  • Continuously improve and automate infrastructure provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, and testing using tools like Terraform, Kubernetes and CI/CD.

  • Advocate for automation-first approaches to reduce operational toil and risk.

• Reliability and Operations

• Partner with teams to define and implement Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and operational dashboards for their services.

• Guide teams through incident response, post-incident reviews, and reliability improvements.

• Identify systemic reliability issues and escalate platform-level concerns to the appropriate owning teams.

• Drive capacity planning and performance tuning activities to ensure scalability and efficiency.

• Troubleshooting and Support

  • Provide expert-level support for complex infrastructure and deployment issues escalated by the product teams.

  • Assist teams in root cause analysis and long-term remediation

• Documentation and Knowledge Sharing 

  • Create and maintain clear documentation, runbooks, release process, CI/CD pipelines, and regression testing procedures 

  • Maintain comprehensive documentation of the release process, CI/CD pipelines, and regression testing procedures

  • Share best practices and lessons learned across teams to raise overall DevOps maturity.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience building production-grade systems with emphasis on automation, integrations and infrastructure tooling

• Problem-Solving: Excellent problem-solving skills with the ability to troubleshoot complex issues in a fast-paced environment.

• Excellent communication, coaching, and collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively across teams and convey technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.

KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS, AND ABILITIES:

• Deep understanding of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles, including SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, and toil reduction.

• Expertise in setting up and managing comprehensive monitoring, logging, and alerting systems

• Proven experience with incident response and leading post-incident review (post-mortem) processes.

• Experience with capacity planning, performance analysis, and optimization of distributed systems.

• Strong expertise in CI/CD tools (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab CI, etc.)

• Practical experience building complex CI/CD pipelines.

• Proficiency in at least one programming language (e.g., Java, Python)

• Ability to read and understand Java code

• Strong command of AWS stack

• Proficiency in Docker, Kubernetes and Helm

• Experience working with databases (SQL, MySQL, PostgreSQL)

• Version control systems (e.g., Git)

• Experience working with Terraform

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:

• Knowledge of various regression testing frameworks and tools (e.g. JUnit).

• Experience with Agile/Scrum methodologies.

• Experience working in regulated environments like healthcare

PHYSICAL DEMANDS AND WORK ENVIRONMENT:

• Duties are typically performed in an office setting.

• Duties may require working outside normal working hours (evenings and weekends) at times.

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