Manager, Platform Engineering at Natera

United States

$138.7k - $173.35k

Manager, Platform Engineering Location: US - Remote Experience: 8+ years in Cloud/Platform/Infrastructure Engineering. About the Role 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. 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. In your first 6 months, you will: Establish the North Star: Take over a high-performing team and refine the strategic roadmap for our cloud and event-streaming services. Deliver with Precision: Close out high-impact, in-flight projects while maintaining the stability and reliability of our production environments. Drive Customer Success: Achieve high internal satisfaction scores by treating the platform as a world-class product used by the entire Natera engineering organization. What You’ll Do Strategic Leadership & Product Ownership Define the Vision: Own the multi-year roadmap for Natera’s Cloud, Orchestration, and Kafka ecosystems, aligning technical debt with future-facing AI-native initiatives. Platform as a Product: Act as the Product Owner of your domain. Conduct user research with internal Natera developers to identify friction points and translate those needs into a seamless, self-service platform. Autonomous Governance: Design and implement automated, AI-driven guardrails that enforce security and architectural standards without requiring manual approvals or slowing down developer velocity. Core Platform Evolution AI-Native Infrastructure: Lead the architecture of a high-scale AWS environment optimized for AI workloads, ensuring deep integration between Kubernetes, Terraform, and event-driven architectures. Operational Excellence: Oversee the delivery of high-throughput event streaming (Kafka/MSK) and orchestration services that the entire company relies on for mission-critical data. Roadmap Alignment: Facilitate cross-functional collaboration with stakeholders across Natera to ensure the platform evolves in lockstep with product requirements. People Leadership & High-Performance Culture Lead the Elite: Manage and mentor a high-performing team of 8 engineers, providing technical leadership and career coaching. Force Multiplier: Foster an environment of high autonomy and ownership. Empower your team to make local architectural decisions while you provide the global context and strategic guardrails. Community Evangelism: Build a vibrant internal engineering community. Regularly share insights on emerging cloud patterns and drive the organic adoption of new platform features across the organization. What You Bring 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Autonomous Execution: You are self-sufficient, comfortable with ambiguity, and capable of building a roadmap from scratch while keeping stakeholders aligned. 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. #LI-DNI 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. Remote USA $138,700—$173,350 USD 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