Senior Manager, Software Engineering — Case Management Platform

POSITION TITLE: Senior Manager, Software Engineering — Case Management Platform (CMP)

POSITION LOCATION: San Carlos, CA, Austin, TX, or Remote, USA

Natera is seeking a hands-on, technically deep Senior Manager of Software Engineering to lead our Case Management Platform (CMP) Core team. CMP is the technical backbone that moves patient cases from order to result across Natera's oncology, women's health, and organ health product lines — software whose reliability translates directly into turnaround time, lab efficiency, and patient outcomes.

This is explicitly not a people-management-only role. You will integration into an existing platform application department and build a new high leverage squad with a distinct mission to bridge Natera's commerce and fulfillment domains. With a small initial footprint, you are expected to be in the code: setting architectural direction, writing and reviewing code, driving production support, and modeling the engineering standard. As the team grows, you will rebalance your time toward leadership, hiring, and strategy — but hands-on technical credibility is a permanent requirement of this role.

We are looking for an agent of change. CMP is pushing hard on AI-native ways of working, mission-based team structure, and InnerSource stewardship. You will not just adopt these shifts — you will drive them.

Lead technically

• Set and defend the architectural direction for your scope; make the hard trade-off calls and own the outcomes
• Write production code, review PRs, and participate in production incident response alongside the team
• Drive design reviews; raise the technical bar through example, not memo
• Own the full SDLC for your systems — conception, design, implementation, test, release, operation, and sunset

Manage and grow people

• Hire and develop top performers; recruit for attitude as aggressively as for aptitude
• Hold regular 1:1s, deliver direct feedback with radical candor, and address underperformance quickly and respectfully
• Guide career development; create real ownership opportunities and delegate decisions, not just tasks
• Build a diverse, high-trust team that reflects the users and patients we serve

Drive the AI-native transformation

• Treat AI as core to how the team builds, delivers, and operates — not an experiment on the side
• Champion the adoption of AI coding tools, agent orchestration, and AI-assisted operations across your team and influence peer teams to follow
• Measure and communicate the leverage AI is creating in your org; retire practices that no longer earn their keep

Partner across the business

• Act as the primary technical point of contact for product management, commerce stakeholders, lab operations, and adjacent engineering teams
• Build and maintain a working relationship with lab managers, lab supervisors, and commerce leaders — understand their world firsthand
• Translate business priorities into engineering plans and translate engineering realities into options business leaders can act on

Manage delivery

• Own estimates, scope, dependencies, risks, and delivery for your team's commitments
• Run lean, outcome-oriented ceremonies; prefer visible work and short feedback loops over heavy process
• Facilitate collaboration and remove blockers; escalate honestly and early

Effect change

• Lead the evolution of our ways of working
• Propose and drive improvements beyond the walls of your immediate team

• BS or MS in Computer Science or equivalent experience
• 8+ years of professional software development experience, with meaningful time building complex data or process-management applications
• 3+ years leading engineering teams, with a track record of hiring, developing, and retaining strong engineers
• Demonstrated hands-on technical ability — recent experience writing production code, leading design reviews, and troubleshooting production issues as a manager, not only as an individual contributor
• Strong fluency in Java or another object-oriented language, modern cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred, including Lambda and other stateless/serverless patterns), relational databases, and distributed systems
• Demonstrated adoption of AI-assisted development, agent-based workflows, or similar modern engineering practices — and the ability to make others productive with them
• Experience partnering with product management, operations, and business stakeholders in a matrixed environment
• Excellent written and verbal communication; comfort operating across time zones with distributed and offshore teammates
• Experience in biotech, healthcare, or another regulated industry is a strong plus

• Hands-on coding, design, and architecture skills — currently practiced, not historical
• Deep understanding of software architecture and the full SDLC in a regulated environment
• Proven record of managing highly effective, mission-oriented teams and building leadership bench strength beneath you
• Comfort diagnosing production problems at all levels — from triage and workaround through root cause and prevention
• Expertise building scalable, resilient distributed systems on AWS, with a bias toward simple, stateless, event-driven designs
• Strong product sense; able to challenge requirements and reshape the problem when that's the better answer
• Extreme ownership: keeps promises, closes loops, and models the behavior expected of the team
• "Yes if" attitude — focused on finding paths forward and making constraints explicit
• Humble, direct, and resilient; gives and receives feedback well
• Commitment to diversity, inclusion, and building teams where people do their best work