Director, Forward Deployed AI Engineering

Natera is a global leader in cell-free DNA testing focused on oncology, women's health, and organ health. We're hiring a Director, Forward Deployed AI Engineering (Head of AI Solutions) to lead a Forward Deployed AI engineering team delivering AI-powered workflow transformation across Sales & Marketing, Finance, Legal, HR, Business Development, and G&A functions.

LOCATION

United States (Remote).

ROLE OVERVIEW

This is explicitly a player-coach role — roughly half the time involves hands-on building alongside engineers.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

Build and Ship

• Scope workflows end-to-end, build agents and automation pipelines, debug integration issues
• Set technical standards through production-grade evals, observability, and rigorous testing
• Intervene when deployments stall or systems face integration challenges

Team Leadership

• Hire and develop Forward Deployed AI Solutions Engineers across S&M and G&A domains
• Establish success metrics: throughput, quality, cost, human intervention rate, cycle time
• Ensure team brings reusable patterns back to central AI organization

Roadmap Partnership

• Maintain prioritized pipeline of AI opportunities through domain embeds and discovery
• Build ROI-based business cases with clear KPIs
• Act as trusted technical advisor translating business goals into sequenced roadmaps

Full Deployment Lifecycle

• Own discovery through production: workflow design, agent build, integration, evals, observability, enablement
• Partner with Platform Engineering on handoff standards and documentation
• Instrument observability: tracing, structured logs, dashboards

Stakeholder Management

• Primary contact for S&M and G&A function heads throughout initiatives
• Drive change management and adoption beyond launch
• Report progress and business impact regularly

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

Technical Depth

• Write code, build agents, and debug production systems
• 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; integrate with CRM, ERP, ticketing, document stores
• Production agent experience with formal KPI tracking and eval frameworks

Leadership & Business Acumen

• Track record leading technical teams while remaining meaningful contributor
• Earn trust with senior business stakeholders
• Make a complex AI system legible to a CFO
• Most technically credible in business reviews; most commercially grounded in technical sessions

Operational Rigor

• Security/compliance mindset: least-privilege, auditability, safe rollback
• Own handoff processes and governance frameworks
• Think in outcomes and KPIs

NICE TO HAVE

• Forward-deployed engineering or Data/AI operations experience
• Hands-on experience with enterprise agentic platforms (CrewAI, LangChain, AWS Bedrock)
• SG&A function background: Finance, Sales Ops, Legal Ops, HR
• Regulated environment experience: HIPAA, SOC 2, GxP, SOX

COMPENSATION

$186,700 – $233,400 USD.