Director, Forward Deployed AI Engineering

Natera is a global leader in cell-free DNA testing, dedicated to oncology, women’s health, and organ health. The Head of AI Solutions will lead a Forward Deployed AI engineering team, focusing on delivering AI-powered workflow transformation across various functions while also being an active contributor in the engineering process.

Responsibilities:

• 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
• Hire, manage, and develop Forward Deployed AI Solutions Engineers embedded across S&M + G&A domains
• Set clear success criteria for each deployment — throughput, quality, cost, human intervention rate, cycle time — and hold the team accountable
• 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
• 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
• Drive deployments from discovery through production: workflow design, agent build, integration, human-in-the-loop checkpoints, evals, observability, and enablement
• 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
• Instrument observability across all deployed workflows: tracing, structured logs, dashboards
• Serve as the primary contact for S&M + G&A function heads throughout every AI initiative, from kickoff through sustained production operation
• 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
• Partner with IT, Security, Legal, and Compliance to ensure all deployments meet data governance and access control requirements

Requirements:

• You write code, build agents, and debug production systems. This is not a delegating-only role and you should not want it to be
• 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. You can integrate with enterprise systems — CRM, ERP, ticketing, document stores — and handle the messy reality of enterprise data
• Experience running agents in production with formal KPI tracking, eval frameworks, and observability standards
• Track record of leading technical teams while remaining a meaningful technical contributor yourself
• Ability to earn trust with senior business stakeholders and translate their goals into an executable roadmap with clear sequencing and trade-offs
• 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
• Comfortable being the most technically credible person in a business review and the most commercially grounded person in a technical design session
• Security and compliance mindset: least-privilege, auditability, and safe rollback are second nature
• Experience owning handoff processes and governance frameworks — not just deploying fast, but deploying durably
• You think in outcomes and KPIs, can defend prioritization calls, and hold yourself to the same production standards you hold your team to
• Prior 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