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Practising for the listing Sr. Software Engineer/Tech Lead, Data & AI Engineering. Its requirements are filled in below. When you have an answer you like, paste it with your CV in Career Mirror to see which of the job's skills it shows.

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Sr. Software Engineer/Tech Lead, Data & AI Engineering
About the Role

Natera is a global leader in cell-free DNA testing, serving patients across oncology, women’s health, and organ health. Our Data & AI organization builds the enterprise data platform and AI systems that turn clinical, genomic, and operational data into products that improve patient care and accelerate the business.

We are looking for a Data & AI Engineering Tech Lead to set the technical direction for a solutions team that builds analytics and AI solutions directly for business stakeholders: data and AI pipelines, data models, semantic layers, and the agents, dashboards, and data products that sit on top of them. This is a hands-on, senior individual contributor role: you will write production code, own architecture and design decisions for the solutions your team delivers, and raise the engineering bar through design leadership, code review, and mentorship.

This team is AI-native by design. We expect engineers to use AI coding harnesses and agentic tooling as a core part of how they build, test, document, and operate solutions, and we expect the Tech Lead to model and scale those practices across the team. You will work in a regulated environment where data quality, lineage, and privacy are core requirements of every solution we ship.

The ideal candidate is a strong engineer first, with a product mindset toward business outcomes, the judgment to make pragmatic architectural tradeoffs, and the communication skills to align engineers, product managers, and business stakeholders around them.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Own the technical design and architecture for the analytics and AI solutions your team delivers; drive design reviews and make build-vs-buy and technology decisions in partnership with the data platform and architecture teams.

• Translate business stakeholder needs into well-scoped technical designs, breaking down complex analytics initiatives into deliverable milestones for the team.

• Establish and enforce engineering standards for modeling, pipeline design, testing, CI/CD, and observability so solutions are built consistently and reusably across business domains.

Hands-On Solutions Engineering

• Design, build, and maintain scalable data pipelines and transformations on our cloud data platform, sourcing clinical, laboratory, operational, and commercial data to serve business analytics.

• Develop governed data models and semantic layers that power self-service analytics, dashboards, and data products (e.g., Patient 360, Provider 360, Test 360) for business teams.

• Develop AI solutions to enable business productivity and automation through use of agentic workflows, RAG/retrieval, and LLM pipelines (extraction/classification)

• Write production-grade SQL and Python; contribute to shared frameworks, templates, and tooling that let the team deliver new analytics solutions faster.

• Ensure the data layer supports performant, trustworthy analytics and LLM querying ; lead root-cause analysis on complex data issues and drive durable fixes.

AI-Native Ways of Working & Mentorship

• Use AI coding assistants and agentic tools daily across the development lifecycle—design, coding, testing, documentation, and operations—and measurably increase your own and the team’s throughput.

• Define and scale the team’s AI-native engineering practices: prompt and context patterns, reusable agent workflows, AI-assisted testing and review, and the guardrails that keep quality and compliance intact.

• Mentor and grow engineers through code review, pairing, and design coaching; partner with the engineering manager on technical hiring, onboarding, and skills development.

Data Quality, Reliability & Compliance

• Implement data quality checks, contracts, lineage, and monitoring so that downstream consumers can trust the data by default.

• Own operational excellence for the team’s solutions: SLAs, incident response, and cost efficiency of compute and storage.

• Ensure pipelines handling PHI and genomic data meet HIPAA, CLIA, and internal security and governance requirements, including access controls, auditability, and retention.

Cross-Functional Partnership

• Work directly with business stakeholders across functions to understand their questions, shape analytics solutions to their needs, and communicate technical tradeoffs in plain language.

• Collaborate with data platforms and AI platform teams to ensure solutions build on shared foundations rather than one-off pipelines.

• Represent the team in architecture forums, data governance discussions, and tool evaluations.

Qualifications

Required

• 7+ years of data or software engineering experience, including 2+ years leading technical design and delivery for a team or major workstream, ideally building analytics solutions for business users.

• Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers, run effective design and code reviews, drive technical consensus, and communicate clearly with technical and non-technical audiences.

• Demonstrated, hands-on use of AI coding assistants and agentic tools in daily engineering work, with a point of view on how to use them well.

• Expert-level SQL and strong Python, with a track record of shipping and operating production data pipelines and data models at scale.

• Deep experience with a modern cloud data warehouse and cloud infrastructure (Snowflake/AWS preferred).

• Hands-on experience with transformation frameworks (dbt or equivalent) and workflow orchestration (Airflow, Dagster, Prefect, or similar).

• 1-2 years of practical background building with LLM frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph, or equivalent) alongside managed AI services and model routing gateways like Snowflake Cortex, AWS Bedrock, and foundational APIs.

• Strong grounding in analytical data modeling (dimensional or domain-driven), semantic layers, data quality engineering, and CI/CD for data systems.

Preferred

• Experience in healthcare, life sciences, or another regulated domain handling PHI or other sensitive data.

• Experience with lab data management systems, lab informatics systems, bioinformatics pipelines is a plus

• Snowflake experience, including performance tuning, cost management, and features such as dynamic tables, Snowpark, or Cortex.

• Sigma experience, or experience with comparable BI and semantic-layer tools (Looker, Tableau, Power BI), and an understanding of how to design data models for self-service consumption.

• Experience building and operating agentic or LLM-based workflows within the data development lifecycle.

• Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) and data observability tooling.

• Experience integrating with Salesforce, laboratory information systems, or EHR data sources.

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related quantitative field, or equivalent practical experience.

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.
Remote USA
$150,400 — $188,000 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-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

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Requirements found

Writing Sql (must) Python (must) Compliance Onboarding Tableau (nice) Power Bi (nice) Salesforce (nice)

What this posting asks for

Level: Lead / staff — The title says "Lead".

Main responsibilities

Technical Leadership & Architecture
Own the technical design and architecture for the analytics and AI solutions your team delivers; drive design reviews and make build-vs-buy and technology de…
Translate business stakeholder needs into well-scoped technical designs, breaking down complex analytics initiatives into deliverable milestones for the team.
Establish and enforce engineering standards for modeling, pipeline design, testing, CI/CD, and observability so solutions are built consistently and reusably…
Hands-On Solutions Engineering
Design, build, and maintain scalable data pipelines and transformations on our cloud data platform, sourcing clinical, laboratory, operational, and commercia…
Develop governed data models and semantic layers that power self-service analytics, dashboards, and data products (e.g., Patient 360, Provider 360, Test 360)…
Develop AI solutions to enable business productivity and automation through use of agentic workflows, RAG/retrieval, and LLM pipelines (extraction/classifica…
Write production-grade SQL and Python; contribute to shared frameworks, templates, and tooling that let the team deliver new analytics solutions faster.
Ensure the data layer supports performant, trustworthy analytics and LLM querying ; lead root-cause analysis on complex data issues and drive durable fixes.

Competencies an interviewer will look for

Technical skill Core
In the posting: “We are looking for a Data & AI Engineering Tech Lead to set the technical direction for a solutions team that builds analytics and AI solutions directly for …” · “This is a hands-on, senior individual contributor role: you will write production code, own architecture and design decisions for the solutions your team del…” · “We expect engineers to use AI coding harnesses and agentic tooling as a core part of how they build, test, document, and operate solutions, and we expect the…”
Show it by: Names the tools, languages or systems used and how; Explains a technical choice and its trade-off.
Communication Core
In the posting: “The ideal candidate is a strong engineer first, with a product mindset toward business outcomes, the judgment to make pragmatic architectural tradeoffs, and …” · “Use AI coding assistants and agentic tools daily across the development lifecycle—design, coding, testing, documentation, and operations—and measurably incre…” · “Work directly with business stakeholders across functions to understand their questions, shape analytics solutions to their needs, and communicate technical …”
Show it by: Adapts the message to the listener; Gives an example of explaining something clearly in writing or speech.
Teamwork and collaboration Core
In the posting: “partner with the engineering manager on technical hiring, onboarding, and skills development.” · “Collaborate with data platforms and AI platform teams to ensure solutions build on shared foundations rather than one-off pipelines.” · “Inclusive collaboration benefits our employees, our community and our patients, and is critical to our mission of changing the management of disease worldwide.”
Show it by: Says what they did inside a team, not only what 'we' did; Shows how a disagreement was handled.
Leadership and mentoring Core
In the posting: “We are looking for a Data & AI Engineering Tech Lead to set the technical direction for a solutions team that builds analytics and AI solutions directly for …” · “This is a hands-on, senior individual contributor role: you will write production code, own architecture and design decisions for the solutions your team del…” · “We expect engineers to use AI coding harnesses and agentic tooling as a core part of how they build, test, document, and operate solutions, and we expect the…”
Show it by: Describes setting direction or a standard others followed; Names someone they coached and what changed for them.
Customer focus Core
In the posting: “Natera is a global leader in cell-free DNA testing, serving patients across oncology, women’s health, and organ health.” · “Our Data & AI organization builds the enterprise data platform and AI systems that turn clinical, genomic, and operational data into products that improve pa…” · “Develop governed data models and semantic layers that power self-service analytics, dashboards, and data products (e.g., Patient 360, Provider 360, Test 360)…”
Show it by: Puts the customer's need in their own words; Shows a result for the customer, not only for the company.
Data and analysis Core
In the posting: “Our Data & AI organization builds the enterprise data platform and AI systems that turn clinical, genomic, and operational data into products that improve pa…” · “We are looking for a Data & AI Engineering Tech Lead to set the technical direction for a solutions team that builds analytics and AI solutions directly for …” · “You will work in a regulated environment where data quality, lineage, and privacy are core requirements of every solution we ship.”
Show it by: Uses a number to describe the situation or the result; Explains what the data showed and what was done with it.
Attention to detail and quality Core
In the posting: “Natera is a global leader in cell-free DNA testing, serving patients across oncology, women’s health, and organ health.” · “You will work in a regulated environment where data quality, lineage, and privacy are core requirements of every solution we ship.” · “Establish and enforce engineering standards for modeling, pipeline design, testing, CI/CD, and observability so solutions are built consistently and reusably…”
Show it by: Gives an example of an error caught before it caused harm; Names the check or standard they used.
Stakeholder management Core
In the posting: “We are looking for a Data & AI Engineering Tech Lead to set the technical direction for a solutions team that builds analytics and AI solutions directly for …” · “The ideal candidate is a strong engineer first, with a product mindset toward business outcomes, the judgment to make pragmatic architectural tradeoffs, and …” · “Translate business stakeholder needs into well-scoped technical designs, breaking down complex analytics initiatives into deliverable milestones for the team.”
Show it by: Shows how they aligned people with different goals; Explains how they handled a 'no' from someone senior.
Problem solving Supporting
In the posting: “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 intervent…”
Show it by: Describes a real problem, the options considered and the one chosen; Shows how the cause was found, not just the fix.
Ownership and accountability Supporting
In the posting: “Own the technical design and architecture for the analytics and AI solutions your team delivers;”
Show it by: Takes a task from start to finish without being chased; Owns a mistake and what was changed after it.
Planning and organisation Supporting
In the posting: “Our Data & AI organization builds the enterprise data platform and AI systems that turn clinical, genomic, and operational data into products that improve pa…”
Show it by: Shows how priorities were set when everything was urgent; Mentions deadlines met and how.

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Practice questions

Tell me about yourself. Dedicated step-by-step practice.
If an interviewer asks something improper How to respond to questions about age, family, origin or health.
Built from this posting (8):
Walk me through a piece of work where you used your strongest technical skill. What exactly did you do? From this posting
Tell me about a time you had to explain something complex to someone outside your field. From this posting
Describe a time you worked with another team to deliver something. What was your part? From this posting
Tell me about a time you helped someone on your team get better at their work. From this posting
How have you used sql in your work? Walk me through one real example. From this posting
Tell me about a problem you solved using python. From this posting
Tell me about a difficult problem you solved at work. How did you find the cause? From this posting
Tell me about a task you took from start to finish without anyone asking you to. From this posting
This posting reads as Software engineering: its questions come first.
Walk me through a feature you built from start to finish. What tools and languages did you use? Software engineering
Tell me about the hardest bug you have tracked down. How did you find the cause? Software engineering
Describe a technical design decision you made and the trade-off behind it. Software engineering
Tell me about a time you disagreed with a teammate in a code review. Software engineering
Production is down and you are the first engineer to notice. What do you do in the first 30 minutes? Software engineering
How do you decide what to test before you ship a change? Software engineering
Tell me about a time you helped a less experienced engineer get unstuck. Software engineering
Your estimate for a feature turns out to be badly wrong halfway through. What do you do? Software engineering
How do you keep your pipeline organised?
Walk me through how you would check whether a report's numbers are right.
Describe a time you handled an upset customer or colleague.
Tell me about a time you had several deadlines at once. How did you decide what to do first?
Give an example of a mistake you caught before it caused a problem.
Tell me about a time you taught someone how to do something.
Describe a time you took the lead without being asked.
Tell me about a time you had to explain something complicated in simple terms.
Describe a process you improved.
Do you have any questions for us?
Why do you want to work here?
Why is there a gap in your employment? Difficult question
Why did you leave your last job? Difficult question
Why are you changing careers? Difficult question
What is your greatest weakness? Difficult question
What are your salary expectations? Difficult question
You seem overqualified for this role. Why do you want it? Difficult question
Improper-question practice: How old are you? / Do you have children? / Where are you from originally?
A customer is angry about a delay you did not cause. What do you do?
How do you keep track of many open customer requests?
Tell me about a time you could not give a customer what they wanted.
You find that the inventory count does not match the system. What do you do?
Tell me about a time a shipment or delivery went wrong.
How do you make sure safety rules are followed on a busy shift?
Two managers ask you to book the same room at the same time. What do you do?
How have you used spreadsheets in your work?
Tell me about a time you had to enter or check a lot of data accurately.
Tell me about a sale or agreement you are proud of.
A prospect says your price is too high. How do you respond?
Tell me about a technical problem you solved on your own.
You find a bug right before a release. What do you do?