Staff Software Engineer

POSITION SUMMARY

Natera is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join a small, high-leverage team inside the Case Management Platform (CMP) organization. This is a new and intentionally unique role: you will sit organizationally within CMP — the engine that drives Natera's cases from order through result — and work shoulder-to-shoulder on priorities set by the commerce side of the business. Your job is to bridge the gap between how Natera sells, orders, and interacts with customers and how Natera fulfills every one of those commitments in the lab.

You will be a force multiplier — fluent in modern AI tools, an orchestrator of agents, and comfortable owning problems end-to-end from a napkin sketch through production. 

If you light up at the intersection of commerce workflows and operational systems, build with AI as a native part of your toolkit, and want to work on software whose outcomes are measured in patient impact — this is a role worth your attention.

PRIMARY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Own high-impact initiatives end-to-end — from problem framing through design, implementation, release, and operation — in service of commerce-driven priorities that land in CMP
• Design and build cloud-native services on AWS, with a strong bias toward stateless, event-driven architectures (AWS Lambda and similar serverless patterns, SQS/SNS/EventBridge, API Gateway, DynamoDB/RDS)
• Act as an orchestrator of AI agents and AI-assisted workflows: compose, direct, and evaluate agent systems to accelerate development, reduce manual toil, and solve problems that would otherwise require a much larger team
• Translate ambiguous business needs — spanning commerce systems and fulfillment operations — into clear technical specifications, APIs, and operations-friendly services
• Write your own stories; break down epics, identify dependencies, estimate complexity, and drive delivery without needing tickets handed to you
• Set the technical bar through strong code, thoughtful design reviews, and mentorship of other engineers across CMP
• Partner directly with commerce product managers, business stakeholders, and CMP peers; translate between those worlds and shield each from the other's complexity
• Participate in on-call rotations and production support; own the fix when something you built breaks, regardless of who wrote the original code
• Challenge the status quo; propose better patterns, tools, and ways of working — and bring teammates along
• Deliver quality software in a regulated environment: automation-first testing, shift-left mindset, "works on my machine" is never the answer

Compliance and training

• This role works with Protected Health Information (PHI) on a regular basis in both paper and electronic form
• Employee must complete HIPAA/PHI privacy, General Policies and Procedure Compliance, and security training within the first 30 days of hire, and maintain current status on all Natera training requirements
• Employee must pass a post-offer criminal background check

QUALIFICATIONS

• BS in Computer Science, a comparable program, or equivalent experience; MS preferred
• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including meaningful time building complex data or process-management applications
• Strong fluency in Java or another modern object-oriented language (Kotlin, C#, Python with OO design, etc.); comfortable moving between languages when the job calls for it
• Deep hands-on experience with AWS, including serverless and stateless patterns (Lambda, Step Functions, API Gateway, event-driven messaging) and relational and non-relational data stores
• Demonstrated adoption of AI-assisted development — not just "I've used Copilot," but a genuine, current practice of composing and orchestrating AI tools and agents to deliver real work
• Experience designing and operating distributed systems, including observability, resilience, security, and performance in production
• Strong SQL and data modeling skills
• Experience partnering directly with product managers and non-engineering stakeholders to shape requirements and trade-offs
• Experience in biotech, healthcare, commerce, order management, or another regulated or operations-critical domain is a strong plus

KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS, AND ABILITIES

• Deep understanding of software engineering fundamentals: OO, SOLID, design patterns, API design, and clean architecture
• AI-native engineer — treats AI tools and agents as standard parts of the workflow and continually raises the ceiling on what they can do
• Fluent in cloud infrastructure and in building the right thing for the shape of the problem — not everything is a Lambda, and not everything is a container
• Full-stack comfort when needed, with a backend/platform center of gravity
• Excellent written and verbal communication; able to make the complex understandable to commerce stakeholders and the ambiguous actionable for engineers
• Extreme ownership — keeps promises, surfaces blockers early, closes loops without being asked
• "Yes if" attitude; focused on paths forward, explicit about trade-offs
• Humility and curiosity; reads code written by others, asks "why" until it reaches the real constraint, and welcomes being wrong when it leads to a better answer
• Commitment to diversity in engineering and to building a team where the best idea wins