engineering
Posted May 13Director, Forward Deployed AI Engineering
at Natera
United StatesRemote
Responsibilities
- Build and ship alongside your team •
- Lead and develop the Forward Deployed team •
- Ensure the team brings patterns, reusable assets, and hard-won learnings back to the central AI & Data organization so the whole company compounds on what you build.
- Maintain a prioritized pipeline of AI and automation opportunities surfaced through domain embeds, business reviews, and your own discovery work. •
- Build and present business cases with projected ROI and clear KPIs to gain alignment from domain leadership, your manager, and your peer AI Forward Deployed Engineering Leads •
- Own the full deployment lifecycle — including handoffs to Platform •
- Drive deployments from discovery through production: workflow design, agent build, integration, human-in-the-loop checkpoints, evals, observability, and enablement. •
- Navigate stakeholders and manage delivery •
- Drive change management: prepare stakeholders for new workflows, set expectations on human review requirements, and push for adoption beyond initial launch. •
- Report progress and business impact to the Head of AI/ML & Data function on a regular cadence, translating technical metrics into business outcomes. •
- Track record of leading technical teams while remaining a meaningful technical contributor yourself. •
Requirements
- The Head of AI Solutions will lead a Forward Deployed AI engineering team and owns the delivery of AI-powered workflow transformation across Sales & Marketing, Finance, Legal, HR, Business Development, Business Operations and other related G&A functions.
- This is a player-coach role in the truest sense: you lead a team of Forward Deployed AI Solutions Engineers, but you are also consistently in the work alongside them — scoping workflows, building, debugging, and iterating in production.
- We believe the pace of change in AI makes proximity to the work non-negotiable at every level of the organization.
- You partner closely with the AI Platform team to ensure every workflow transitions cleanly to long-term ownership, and you bring patterns and reusable assets back to the broader AI & Automation organization. What You'll Own
- Hire, manage, and develop Forward Deployed AI Solutions Engineers embedded across S&M + G&A domains. •
- Serve as the primary contact for S&M + G&A function heads throughout every AI initiative, from kickoff through sustained production operation. •
- Strong working knowledge of LLM and agent behavior: prompting, context management, tool use, RAG, MCP, evals, and failure modes. •
- Comfortable with CLIs, APIs, webhooks, SQL, Python scripting, and cloud platforms.
- Experience running agents in production with formal KPI tracking, eval frameworks, and observability standards.
- Strong written and verbal communication. For example, you can make a complex AI system legible to a CFO and a business constraint legible to an engineer. •
- experience in forward-deployed engineering or Data/AI related technical operations. • Hands-on
- experience with an enterprise agentic platform (CrewAI, LangChain, AWS Bedrock, Claude, Codex) or directly against a model API. •
- Background in or deep familiarity with one or more SG&A functions: Finance, Sales Ops, Legal Ops, HR, or Customer Experience. •
- Experience in regulated environments: HIPAA, SOC 2, GxP, or SOX.
- Natera™ is a global leader in cell-free DNA (cfDNA) testing, dedicated to oncology, women’s health, and organ health.
Benefits
- 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.
- Remote USA $186,700 — $233,400 USD OUR OPPORTUNITY
- 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.
- 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
Contact
- For more information, visit www.natera.com .
- 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.
Additional details
- The expectation is that roughly half your time is spent building and shipping alongside your engineers, using that firsthand knowledge to make better prioritization calls, give feedback, and earn the trust of both your team and the business stakeholders you serve.
- Spend meaningful time as a hands-on contributor — scoping workflows end-to-end, building agents and automation pipelines, debugging integration issues, and tuning prompts and context in production. •
- Set the technical bar through your own work: production-grade evals, observability, clean handoff documentation, and rigorous testing before anything ships. •
- Jump in when a deployment is stalled, a system integration is unexpectedly gnarly, or a workflow needs a senior engineer's judgment to get unstuck.
- Set clear success criteria for each deployment — throughput, quality, cost, human intervention rate, cycle time — and hold the team accountable. •
- Partner with Sales, Marketing and G&A leadership to set and execute the roadmap •
- Act as a trusted technical advisor to Sales, Marketing, and G&A function heads — translating their goals into a grounded, sequenced roadmap and keeping them informed as priorities shift.
- Leverage the Platform to accelerate your build and ask the Platform engineering team to add more reusable features to the Platform to accelerate future builds •
- Partner with the Platform Engineering team to establish and follow handoff standards — ensuring every workflow transitions with proper documentation, runbooks, SLAs, and instrumentation in place. •
- Re-engage when business conditions change materially and a handed-off workflow needs meaningful rework. •