Natera is seeking an experienced and driven Associate Director of Bioinformatics Pipeline Development to lead a team focused on building and maintaining scalable, robust, and production-ready bioinformatics pipelines within our Women’s Health and Organ Health bioinformatics team. The ideal candidate will have a strong background in computational biology, software engineering, and bioinformatics, with proven leadership in managing technical teams. This role is pivotal to ensuring our genetic testing solutions are powered by efficient, high-quality, and reproducible computational workflows.
Primary Responsibilities:
Leadership and Team Management: Lead and mentor a team of bioinformatics engineers and scientists, providing strategic guidance and fostering a collaborative, high-performing environment. Define and drive goals for the pipeline development team in alignment with company objectives. Cultivate a culture of technical excellence and continuous improvement.
Pipeline Development and Optimization: Oversee the design, implementation, and deployment of automated, production-grade bioinformatics pipelines. Ensure pipelines are scalable, maintainable, and well-documented, supporting clinical-grade analyses across multiple assay types. Champion the use of software engineering best practices in pipeline development (e.g., CI/CD, version control, unit testing, containerization).
Cross-functional Collaboration: Work closely with pipeline engineering, R&D, Clinical, QA, DevOps, and Product teams to ensure seamless integration of new assays and tools into the production environment. Collaborate with scientific stakeholders to translate research concepts into stable, production-ready workflows.
Operational Excellence: Monitor pipeline performance, identify bottlenecks, and implement improvements to increase reliability and efficiency. Maintain rigorous compliance with regulatory requirements and quality standards for clinical pipelines. Establish robust monitoring and alerting mechanisms for pipeline health and data integrity.
Innovation and Technical Strategy: Stay informed of advancements in bioinformatics technologies, workflow management systems, and cloud computing infrastructure. Guide the adoption of novel tools and methods to improve computational efficiency, scalability, and reproducibility.
Qualifications:
M.S. or Ph.D. in Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Computer Science, or a related field.
Minimum of 7 years (post PhD) of experience in bioinformatics pipeline development, with at least 3 years in a managerial capacity.
Hands-on experience developing and deploying pipelines in production environments, preferably in a clinical or regulated setting.
Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities:
Deep expertise in pipeline orchestration tools (e.g., WDL, Nextflow, Cromwell, Snakemake).
Deep expertise in short and long read NGS data processing algorithms including variant calling
Proficiency in scripting and programming languages such as Python, Bash, or Java.
Experience working in cloud environments (AWS, GCP) and with containerization tools (Docker, Kubernetes), including account configuration and management
Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional technical teams and deliver high-impact solutions.
Strong project management and communication skills, capable of conveying technical concepts to diverse audiences.
OUR OPPORTUNITY
Natera™ is a global leader in cell-free DNA (cfDNA) testing, dedicated to oncology, women’s health, and organ health. Our aim is to make personalized genetic testing and diagnostics part of the standard of care to protect health and enable earlier and more targeted interventions that lead to longer, healthier lives.
The Natera team consists of highly dedicated statisticians, geneticists, doctors, laboratory scientists, business professionals, software engineers and many other professionals from world-class institutions, who care deeply for our work and each other. When you join Natera, you’ll work hard and grow quickly. Working alongside the elite of the industry, you’ll be stretched and challenged, and take pride in being part of a company that is changing the landscape of genetic disease management.
WHAT WE OFFER
Competitive Benefits - Employee benefits include comprehensive medical, dental, vision, life and disability plans for eligible employees and their dependents. Additionally, Natera employees and their immediate families receive free testing in addition to fertility care benefits. Other benefits include pregnancy and baby bonding leave, 401k benefits, commuter benefits and much more. We also offer a generous employee referral program!
For more information, visit www.natera.com.
Natera is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to ensuring a diverse and inclusive workplace environment, and welcome people of different backgrounds, experiences, abilities and perspectives. Inclusive collaboration benefits our employees, our community and our patients, and is critical to our mission of changing the management of disease worldwide.
All qualified applicants are encouraged to apply, and will be considered without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, age, veteran status, disability or any other legally protected status. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with applicable laws.
If you are based in California, we encourage you to read this important information for California residents.
Link: https://www.natera.com/notice-of-data-collection-california-residents/
Please be advised that Natera will reach out to candidates with a @natera.com email domain ONLY. Email communications from all other domain names are not from Natera or its employees and are fraudulent. Natera does not request interviews via text messages and does not ask for personal information until a candidate has engaged with the company and has spoken to a recruiter and the hiring team. Natera takes cyber crimes seriously, and will collaborate with law enforcement authorities to prosecute any related cyber crimes.
For more information:
- BBB announcement on job scams
- FBI Cyber Crime resource page
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