Manager, Platform 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 scalability, cost efficiency, and reliability across the platform.