AI Staff Software Engineer

About the Role

Natera is standing up a new AI-native engineering team within our CMP (Case Management Platform) organization, focused on transforming how patient samples move from order to result. This team operates with a different model than traditional engineering groups: small, senior, AI-centric, product-focused, and built to move fast.

As a Staff Software Engineer, you will be one of the founding technical leaders of this team. Your mission is to accelerate accessioning automation; the process by which requisition forms, samples, and kits are transformed into lab instructions; by applying modern AI and intelligent document processing (IDP) to eliminate manual transcription and unlock a multi-million-dollar annual savings opportunity.

You'll be building AI-powered services that integrate with multiple mature systems. You'll own deliverables end-to-end.

What You'll Do

• Lead the technical design and delivery of AI-native accessioning automation services across paper and electronic requisition forms.

• Build fast, ship independently. Operate in small, high-autonomy pods. Drive deliverables from prototype to production without waiting for consensus.

• Apply AI pragmatically. Use LLMs, vision models, OCR, and IDP frameworks to solve real accessioning problems.

• Own the product outcome, not just the code. Partner directly with Accessioning Operations, Product, and Engineering teams to understand workflows and measure impact in throughput and cost savings.

• Integrate across systems, build into existing mature commerce and fulfillment systems

• Set the bar for engineering practice on a new team: AI-assisted development, strong test automation, a high leverage ratio enabled by modern tooling, CI/CD, and observability.

• Be curious. Evaluate new AI tools, models, and vendor solutions. Build vs. buy vs. integrate decisions are yours to drive.

• Mentor and multiply. Raise the technical quality of peers through design reviews, pairing, and evangelizing best practices.

What We're Looking For

This is an AI-centric, product-focused, move-fast role. You thrive when given a problem and trusted to solve it. You're equally comfortable hands-on coding, debugging, designing architecture, and interacting with stakeholders..

Required Qualifications

• BS in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience.

• 10+ years of software engineering experience building production systems that handle real business processes or data workflows.

• Demonstrated ability to ship AI-powered features in production

• Experience with modern AI-assisted development tooling (Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot) as part of daily workflow.

• Strong backend engineering fundamentals: REST/gRPC APIs, microservices, relational databases, event-driven architectures.

• Proficiency in at least one modern backend stack (Python preferred given the AI ecosystem; Java, Go, or TypeScript also acceptable).

• Experience integrating third-party AI/IDP platforms

• A track record of working fast and independently 

• Product mindset: you measure success by business outcome, not lines of code.

• Excellent written and verbal communication; you can explain trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders.

• Commitment to building inclusive, high-performing teams.

Nice to Have

• Experience with healthcare, clinical lab, or diagnostics workflows (HIPAA, regulated environments).

• Prior work on document data extraction, forms automation, or accessioning/intake systems.

• Familiarity with LIMS platforms (LabVantage or others) — for integration context only, not configuration.

• Front-end experience (React) for building internal tools and operator UIs.

• Experience evaluating and fine-tuning vision or document-understanding models.

• MLOps experience: model evaluation, monitoring, drift detection, prompt/version management.

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities

• Modern AI/ML application patterns — prompt engineering, evals, retrieval, structured output, vision + OCR pipelines.

• Backend engineering, REST APIs, relational databases, cloud services (AWS/GCP/Azure).

• CI/CD, observability, and test automation as defaults, not afterthoughts.

• Quality mindset with awareness of regulated environments (CLIA, HIPAA, GxP).

• Strong bias for action. Curiosity is non-negotiable.

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