Manager, Platform Engineering

Manager, Platform Engineering

Location: US - Remote
Experience: 8+ years in Cloud/Platform/Infrastructure Engineering.

About the Role

As the Manager of Platform Engineering, you will lead the backbone of Natera’s infrastructure. You aren’t just managing a team, you are the Product Manager of our Cloud Ecosystem. You will oversee three critical high-performing workstreams: Cloud Engineering, Orchestration and Kafka, consisting of several elite engineers, including Staff-level experts.

At Natera, we don't just "provide infrastructure", we build an AI-native Internal Developer Platform (IDP). Your mission is to ensure that our cloud environment doesn't just support workloads, but makes deploying and scaling them effortless for every engineering team in the company.

We operate with a "Platform as a Product" philosophy. This means you will treat our internal developers as customers, seeking to understand their friction points and delivering a seamless, self-service experience that balances speed with enterprise-grade guardrails. Reporting directly to the Director of Platform Engineering, you will have the autonomy to define the roadmap, align stakeholders across the organization, and lead your team to execute on a vision that directly impacts Natera’s ability to innovate at scale.

In your first 6 months, you will:

• Establish the North Star: Take over a high-performing team and refine the strategic roadmap for our cloud and event-streaming services.

• Deliver with Precision: Close out high-impact, in-flight projects while maintaining the stability and reliability of our production environments.

• Drive Customer Success: Achieve high internal satisfaction scores by treating the platform as a world-class product used by the entire Natera engineering organization.

What You’ll Do

Strategic Leadership & Product Ownership

• Define the Vision: Own the multi-year roadmap for Natera’s Cloud, Orchestration, and Kafka ecosystems, aligning technical debt with future-facing AI-native initiatives.

• Platform as a Product: Act as the Product Owner of your domain. Conduct user research with internal Natera developers to identify friction points and translate those needs into a seamless, self-service platform.

• Autonomous Governance: Design and implement automated, AI-driven guardrails that enforce security and architectural standards without requiring manual approvals or slowing down developer velocity.

Core Platform Evolution

• AI-Native Infrastructure: Lead the architecture of a high-scale AWS environment optimized for AI workloads, ensuring deep integration between Kubernetes, Terraform, and event-driven architectures.

• Operational Excellence: Oversee the delivery of high-throughput event streaming (Kafka/MSK) and orchestration services that the entire company relies on for mission-critical data.

• Roadmap Alignment: Facilitate cross-functional collaboration with stakeholders across Natera to ensure the platform evolves in lockstep with product requirements.

People Leadership & High-Performance Culture

• Lead the Elite: Manage and mentor a high-performing team of 8 engineers, providing technical leadership and career coaching.

• Force Multiplier: Foster an environment of high autonomy and ownership. Empower your team to make local architectural decisions while you provide the global context and strategic guardrails.

• Community Evangelism: Build a vibrant internal engineering community. Regularly share insights on emerging cloud patterns and drive the organic adoption of new platform features across the organization.

What You Bring

• Strategic Platform Leadership: 8+ years of experience in Cloud, Platform, or Infrastructure Engineering, with at least 2-3 years in a leadership role managing high-performing teams.

• The "Product" Mindset: A proven track record of treating infrastructure as a product. You have experience conducting internal user research, defining service-level objectives (SLOs), and building self-service tools that developers actually want to use.

• Technical Authority: Deep, "under-the-hood" expertise in AWS, Kubernetes, and Terraform. You should be comfortable acting as a technical peer and mentor to your engineers.

• Event-Driven Architecture: Expert-level knowledge of Kafka/MSK and orchestration services. You understand how to scale high-throughput streaming data for mission-critical applications.

• AI-Native Operations: Practical experience or a deep understanding of applying AI techniques, such as RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), agentic reasoning, or LLM-driven automation, to streamline operational workflows and platform governance.

• Autonomous Execution: You are self-sufficient, comfortable with ambiguity, and capable of building a roadmap from scratch while keeping stakeholders aligned.

• Exceptional Communication: You are a "creative evangelist" who can translate complex infrastructure roadmaps into clear business value for executive leadership and drive organic adoption across the engineering organization.