Principal Software Engineer

About the Role

We are seeking a highly experienced and strategic-minded Principal Software Engineer or SRE to join our team. In this role, you will be a key technical leader, responsible for the architecture, development, and maintenance of our core infrastructure. Your primary mission will be to significantly enhance developer productivity and system reliability for our scientific software teams. You will tackle some of our most complex and ambiguous problems, working across multiple teams and disciplines to build the foundational technology that enables groundbreaking scientific discovery.

 

 

Responsibilities

• Infrastructure Development: Architect, design, and implement scalable, reliable, and cost-effective infrastructure solutions to support our scientific software development lifecycle.

• Developer Productivity: Identify bottlenecks and pain points in our development workflows. Build tools, automation, and platforms (e.g., CI/CD pipelines, container orchestration) that make it easier for scientists and engineers to build, test, and deploy code.

• Reliability & Performance: Act as a subject matter expert for system reliability. You will design and implement observability, monitoring, alerting, and incident response systems to ensure our critical services meet their SLAs.

• Technical Leadership: Mentor and guide other engineers, promoting best practices in software development, SRE principles, and operational excellence. You will influence technical decisions across multiple teams.

• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with research scientists and software engineers to understand their unique needs and translate scientific requirements into robust, production-grade infrastructure solutions.

 

 

Required Qualifications

• Experience: 10+ years of experience in software engineering, with significant time spent in a scientific computing environment. Experience with large-scale distributed systems is a must.

• Programming & Scripting: Strong proficiency in at least one major programming language (e.g., Python, Go, Java, or C++) and scripting languages (e.g., Bash).

• Infrastructure as Code: Deep experience with tools like Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi.

• Cloud Computing: Extensive hands-on experience with at least one major cloud provider (e.g., AWS, GCP, or Azure).

• Containerization & Orchestration: Expertise with Docker, Kubernetes, and Helm.

• Observability: Hands-on experience with tools for monitoring, logging, and tracing (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack, Datadog).

• Domain-Specific Experience: Experience with scientific computing, high-performance computing (HPC), or handling large datasets is highly desirable.

 

 

Why Join Us?

• Join a team dedicated to pushing the boundaries of scientific discovery.

• Work on problems that have a direct impact on our ability to conduct cutting-edge research.

• Opportunity to operate with a high degree of autonomy and influence the technical direction of the entire company.

• Competitive salary and benefits.

 

The pay range is listed and actual compensation packages are based on a wide array of factors unique to each candidate, including but not limited to skill set, years & depth of experience, certifications and specific office location. This may differ in other locations due to cost of labor considerations.San Carlos, CA $191,800—$239,800 USD

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