Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Natera is seeking a Principal AI Engineer to set technical direction and build its Vector Store GenAI Platform for document intelligence and retrieval across the Real-World Data organization. The role owns architecture and hands-on delivery of retrieval, document processing, and ingestion systems, while partnering with clinical, engineering, and product leaders to improve platform quality and operability.
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
Skills
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field
- 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
- An advanced degree or background in a clinical or life sciences discipline is a plus
- AWS strongly preferred
- 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
Benefits
- Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, life and disability plans for eligible employees and their dependents
- Free testing for Natera employees and their immediate families
- Fertility care benefits
- Pregnancy and baby bonding leave
- 401k benefits
- Commuter benefits
- Employee referral program
Company Overview
Company H1B Sponsorship