Manager of Bioinformatics (Women's Health and Organ Health)

Natera is seeking a Manager, Bioinformatics to lead production support for the bioinformatics and data science algorithms behind our Women's Health and Organ Health products. You will lead a team of Data and Bioinformatics Scientists who are accountable for how those algorithms behave on real samples, and you will own the interface between that team and the production organization. The key challenge of this role is resolving inconclusive reports, where a scientist has to weigh the full body of evidence to reach a determination. You will determine whether an inconclusive report reflects technical constraints or a data quality issue, and how upstream processes should change so that fewer cases arrive inconclusive. You will maintain a catalogue of known patterns so that new cases can be matched to settled ones, and use AI to assemble and help interpret the evidence at triage. The job is more than operational, and it is the most cross-functional seat on the team.

Responsibilities

Support Ownership: Own the support function for our data science and bioinformatics algorithms in production, and make sure its answers are right and arrive when they are still useful; Investigation and Root Cause: Lead complex investigations that cross a system boundary; Distinguish a biological signal problem from an algorithm problem, a data problem, and an infrastructure problem, and know which group owns the fix; Turn one-off investigations into durable rules and design changes, so the same question does not arrive twice; Change Validation: Own process validation for pipelines and algorithms as operations change; Define what evidence is required before a change goes into a workflow that is running samples, and hold that bar when there is schedule pressure against it; Team Leadership and Development: Lead, hire, and grow a team of Data and Bioinformatics Scientists; Lead by example, showing your team how to build and exercise deep systems judgment; Cross-functional Partnership: Partner with Production Engineering, Product, Bio Development, laboratory operations, and the Data Science R&D teams to resolve operational issues and prevent recurring ones; Represent what the algorithms actually do, to groups that depend on them, and negotiate the commitments and upstream fixes that need their agreement; Ways of Working: Set the standard for what an AI agent may conclude on its own and what has to be reproduced by hand before it goes in a record; Resolve inconclusive reports, determining whether they reflect technical constraints or a data quality issue, and maintain a catalogue of known patterns so that new cases can be matched to settled ones

Requirements

M.S. or Ph.D. in a technical discipline such as Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Data Science, or a related field; Equivalent depth built through work counts fully; 5+ years working with genomic or sequencing data, including 2+ years leading people; Demonstrated ownership of a support, escalation, or on-call function with commitments attached, in a setting where being wrong had consequences; Demonstrated experience leading an investigation to resolution across more than one system boundary, including deciding when to stop; Demonstrated ability to reach agreement across organizational lines without authority; Enough sequencing and bioinformatics fluency to tell a real pipeline failure from an expected one, and to push back when a result looks plausible but is not; Ability to reconstruct what happened from logs, intermediate files, and pipeline outputs, working directly in the data yourself; Python and SQL used for investigation; Experience working inside change control, including validation and documentation practice that holds up to review after the fact; Experience defining a support process rather than inheriting one; People leadership that shows up in specifics; Enough understanding of the laboratory side to recognize when a data problem started upstream of anything you own; Cross-functional relationships as part of the work; Communication, negotiation, and persuasion at a senior level

Nice to have

Machine learning or statistical analysis experience applied to genomic data; Experience with cell-free DNA, prenatal, or carrier screening applications; Experience in an accredited or high-complexity laboratory setting, or with the practices and standards that apply to a regulated diagnostic; Familiarity with workflow systems such as WDL, Nextflow, Snakemake, or Cromwell; Experience building observability or alerting that caught a problem before a customer did

Benefits

Annual performance incentive bonus; Long-term equity awards; Comprehensive health benefits (medical, dental, vision); 401(k) with company match; Generous paid time off and company holidays; Additional wellness and work-life benefits; Life and disability plans; Free testing for employees and their immediate families; Fertility care benefits; Pregnancy and baby bonding leave; Commuter benefits; Employee referral program