Key skills
Bioinformatics pipelinesAWSPythonWorkflow orchestration toolsDockerLarge genomic datasetsCI/CDUnit testingTest-driven developmentCommunication skillsTeam playerAirflowUnit TestingEC2S3IAMCommunication
About this role
Natera is a global leader in cell-free DNA (cfDNA) testing with a focus on women's health, oncology, and organ health. They are seeking a Senior Bioinformatics Engineer to provide technical expertise and drive the automation of bioinformatics pipelines for oncology products.
Responsibilities:
- Develop, maintain, and scale production-grade bioinformatics pipelines
- Lead the translation of validated research workflows into scalable, automated, cloud-based production systems
- Architect and drive automation initiatives to improve pipeline scalability, reliability, reproducibility, and turnaround time (TAT)
- Design and oversee secure, high-throughput data transfer solutions across AWS accounts
- Proactively identify bottlenecks and implement performance and cost optimizations
- Contribute to long-term roadmap planning for automation and production pipeline evolution
Requirements:
- Master's degree in Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Computer Science, or related quantitative field
- 5+ years of experience developing and operating bioinformatics or large-scale data processing pipelines in production environments
- Strong proficiency in a production programming language (e.g., Python)
- Extensive experience working in AWS or comparable cloud platforms
- Proven ability to design scalable, automated systems with minimal manual intervention
- Demonstrated experience owning automated pipelines end-to-end, including debugging across data, application, and infrastructure layers
- Deep expertise with workflow orchestration tools (e.g., WDL, Nextflow, Snakemake)
- Strong experience with Docker and containerized execution at scale
- Advanced knowledge of AWS services such as S3, EC2, AWS Batch, Airflow, and IAM, including multi-account architectures
- Experience leading automation efforts and driving technical improvements across teams
- Experience handling large genomic datasets
- Strong understanding of software engineering best practices, including CI/CD, unit testing, and test-driven development
- Excellent communication skills and ability to influence technical direction across scientific and engineering stakeholders
- Team player, self-motivated and detail oriented are essential