Principal AI Engineer

POSITION SUMMARY

Natera is seeking a Principal AI Engineer to set technical direction for, and hands-on build of, the Vector Store GenAI Platform that powers document intelligence and retrieval across our Real-World Data (RWD) organization. The platform ingests clinical documents from multiple sources, indexes them for high-quality search, and makes that content available to downstream AI workflows and business use cases across oncology and other clinical domains.

This is a principal-level individual contributor role with architecture-plus-build ownership of retrieval, document processing, and ingestion systems. You will define platform strategy and sequencing, ship production code in a cloud environment, raise the reliability and quality of search and retrieval, and prove new approaches through POCs and benchmarks. You will partner with clinical, engineering, and product leaders to turn ambiguous priorities into a clear technical roadmap, establish standards for how retrieval serves agents and re-extraction workflows, and deliver measurable improvements in platform quality and operability—with high autonomy and limited day-to-day direction.

The ideal candidate combines deep hands-on engineering with a track record of owning complex AI platforms end to end. You set direction, implement critical path yourself, and elevate the technical bar across the teams that consume and extend the platform.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Own platform architecture and hands-on delivery for the Vector Store GenAI Platform, including search and retrieval, document processing and chunking, ingestion pipelines, and APIs that serve downstream AI workflows.
• Set technical direction for hybrid search and retrieval quality; evaluate embedding models and retrieval approaches through working implementations, POCs, and benchmarks, and drive adoption of what works in production.
• Advance document parsing and chunking so clinical content is indexed in a way that supports accurate, structured, and faceted retrieval across common document types.
• Define and build stable, reproducible retrieval for agent and re-extraction workloads, including durable content identifiers, flexible context assembly, versioned indices, and quality or confidence signals.
• Strengthen document classification and ingestion visibility so source material is discoverable, operable, and measurable at scale across historical and ongoing data flows.
• Continuously improve retrieval quality through better deduplication, clinical concept normalization, and exploration of promising retrieval methods where they add clear value.
• Integrate LLM capabilities into existing production systems with attention to performance, scalability, cost, observability, and safe operation in a regulated environment.
• Partner with clinical AI, engineering, product, and SME stakeholders to prioritize workstreams, define success metrics, and sequence roadmap investments without disrupting the live platform.
• Provide principal-level technical leadership through architecture decisions, design reviews, clear documentation, mentoring influence, and pragmatic tradeoffs across accuracy, latency, cost, and delivery timelines.

QUALIFICATIONS

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field; an advanced degree or background in a clinical or life sciences discipline is a plus.
• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including substantial ownership of production systems at scale.
• 5+ years building and shipping AI/ML-powered applications in production, with deep hands-on experience in retrieval-augmented systems, vector search, and document-centric AI pipelines—including indexing, retrieval quality, evaluation, and integration with downstream LLM or agent systems.
• Demonstrated track record as a principal or equivalent IC: setting technical direction for a platform or multi-team capability, making architecture decisions that stick, and personally delivering critical path production code.
• Strong hands-on expertise in Python and modern software engineering practices, including testing, code review, workflow orchestration, and agile delivery in large existing codebases.
• Experience designing and operating AI systems in cloud environments, with AWS strongly preferred; experience with CI/CD, observability, and production support is expected.
• Proven ability to work independently as an architecture-plus-build IC—influencing without direct authority, aligning stakeholders, and delivering end-to-end from strategy through integration and rollout—with strong communication across technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience with clinical or structured healthcare documents and document-centric search or RAG systems is strongly preferred.
• Experience in healthcare, life sciences, or other regulated industries is strongly preferred.
• Experience designing retrieval interfaces used by agents or multi-step LLM workflows is a plus.

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