Principal Software Engineer

Natera is seeking a Principal Software Engineer for its R&D team. The role owns architecture, implementation, and delivery of major platform initiatives, provides technical leadership and mentorship, and partners with scientists and other R&D engineers to build cloud infrastructure, workflow platforms, and data platforms.

Responsibilities:

• Architecture & Delivery: Own the design, implementation, and delivery of major initiatives across our platform. Take fuzzy problems through to shipped, working software used in production
• Technical Leadership: Lead architecture and design reviews. Help the team find the right solution for the problem and avoid unnecessary complexity. Influence technical decisions across the team
• Mentorship: Mentor mid-level engineers through code review, design docs, and pairing. Raise the engineering bar by example
• AI-Native Development: Build and improve our AI-coding tooling alongside the rest of the team. Help us push the frontier of agent-driven software development inside the company
• Cross-Functional Partnership: Work with bioinformaticians, scientists, and other R&D engineers to understand their needs and translate them into platform capabilities. Partner with the team lead on roadmap, prioritization, and tough technical calls

Requirements:

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience across a range of systems and problem types
• Production experience with a major cloud platform (AWS preferred; GCP or Azure equivalent)
• You've designed for a cloud, not just deployed to one
• Production experience with Kubernetes (or equivalent)
• Comfortable reasoning about cluster design, scheduling, networking, and workload patterns
• Production experience with Terraform (or equivalent)
• Comfortable owning shared modules and multi-environment deployments
• Strong proficiency in at least one general-purpose language (Python, Go, Java, or similar)
• Comfortable picking up new languages as needed — and comfortable using AI tooling to accelerate that
• You've shipped software to end users (internal or external)
• You understand the realities of running a product — incongruent user feedback, competing priorities, the gap between requirements and what users actually need
• You've led an engineering team before and have mentored junior engineers
• You're comfortable being the technical owner of multi-quarter initiatives
• You've worked in fast-moving environments where results need to be delivered quickly
• Scrappy, MVP-first, comfortable shipping in days rather than weeks
• AWS, Kubernetes, Python, Go, Groovy, Terraform, Helm, Nextflow, WDL, Django, React
• Product-Minded: You think in terms of business and user problems, not tickets. You ask "should we build this?" before "how do I build this?"
• Calibrated Judgement: You know when to move fast and break things, and when to slow down and double-check. The ability to dial this in based on context is something we hire specifically for
• AI-Native Development: Actively excited about AI-native development. Not just willing to use Claude / Cursor, but actively interested in building tooling that makes your colleagues 10x faster
• Prior work in any of the following helps you ramp faster, but is not required: scientific or bioinformatics computing, LIMS or laboratory data systems, workflow orchestration engines (Nextflow, WDL, Airflow, Argo, Temporal, Dagster, etc.), large-scale ETL or data pipeline systems, or HPC/batch-compute platforms