Natera
Principal AI Scientist
Job Summary
The Principal ML Engineer is responsible for leading the development and deployment of advanced AI models within healthcare and genomics, focusing on clinical and genomic applications. The role involves model selection, fine-tuning, and integrating models like LLMs into real-world workflows, ensuring scalability and compliance with data standards. Collaboration with cross-functional teams such as clinicians, bioinformaticians, and product managers is essential to align technical solutions with healthcare needs. Candidates should possess extensive experience in machine learning, deep learning frameworks, cloud platforms, and model optimization, with a strong emphasis on health data privacy and security.
Required Skills
Benefits
Job Description
Principal AI Scientist
Role Overview
We are seeking a technically deep, impact-driven ML/AI Scientist with expertise in multimodal data (e.g., genomic, transcriptomic, clinical, and/or imaging) to unlock transformative insights in precision medicine.
As a senior technical leader, you will:
- Lead development of novel ML/AI approaches for translational research and drug development
- Bridge research innovation and production delivery alongside AI engineers, data scientists, clinicians, and product teams
- Leverage unique, large-scale multimodal datasets and high-performance computing infrastructure
Key Responsibilities
Model Research & Development
- Select, fine-tune and optimize foundation models (e.g., LLMs, U-Net, ViT, transformers, GNNs, diffusion/embedding models for multimodal data)
- Prototype and benchmark novel architectures for complex tasks across sequencing, imaging and clinical data
- Build agentic systems to automate sophisticated workflows
Productionization & MLOps
- Design and implement scalable, observable, and maintainable ML pipelines on AWS (SageMaker, EC2/GPU, Lambda, ECS/EKS)
- Containerize models (Docker/Kubernetes), develop APIs or batch services, and integrate into CI/CD workflows
- Contribute to reusable tooling (prompt libraries, feature extractors, evaluation harnesses) and high-performance retrieval strategies (vector DBs, RAG)
- Ensure data governance, privacy and compliance (HIPAA, GDPR) throughout model development and deployment
Scientific Leadership & Collaboration
- Partner with domain experts to define scientific questions, shape the ML roadmap and prioritize strategic data problems
- Rapidly test hypotheses, ship prototypes/MVPs and define evaluation metrics (accuracy, latency, interpretability, robustness, fairness)
- Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to cross-functional stakeholders and drive data-driven decision making
Mentorship & Best Practices
- Provide technical leadership and mentorship to junior engineers and scientists
- Foster best practices in code quality, testing, reproducibility and documentation
- Publish high-impact research in peer-reviewed journals or conferences
Required Qualifications
- PhD in Computer Science, Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Statistics or equivalent practical experience
- 8+ years applying ML/AI to real-world problems in healthcare, life sciences, genomics or digital pathology
- Proficiency in Python and deep-learning frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow or Keras)
- Hands-on experience integrating LLMs and/or computer-vision models into production pipelines
- Strong communication skills with demonstrated cross-functional leadership
Preferred Qualifications
- Prior work with EHR/LIMS data processing or bioinformatics pipelines
- Publications or open-source contributions in biomedical AI / ML
- Familiarity with agent frameworks (e.g., LangChain, MCP) and automated decision-support workflows
- Experience with vector databases and semantic search (Pinecone, Weaviate)
- Hands-on expertise with AWS ML services, container orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) and API development
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
Natera
Dedicated to oncology, women’s health, and organ health. Natera’s cell-free DNA tests help protect health and inform more personalized decisions about care.
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