Senior Platform Engineer

Experience: 5+ years in Platform Engineering, Infrastructure, DevOps or Site Reliability Engineering.

We are building an Internal Developer Portal at Natera, and we are looking for a Senior Platform Engineer to help build it. This is a hands-on software engineering role: you will write the portal, the golden paths that run on it, and the integrations underneath, not just configure someone else’s tooling.

It is a genuine build, but not a blank page. A great deal of capability is already in production, reached today through hand-triggered GitLab pipelines, purpose-built internal UIs and wiki pages that carry the steps and the caveats. A significant part of this role is bringing that capability into the portal as first-class golden paths, re-envisioned rather than wrapped. A new interface over an old workflow does not get adopted. You will join an established Infrastructure Provisioning team inside a larger Platform Engineering organization, building alongside the engineers delivering it and working with the senior engineers who set technical direction.

Success is measured by one thing above all others: Developer adoption.

• Platform Foundation: Contribute to the implementation of the portal platform, then take a major hand in developing and operating it as a product with real users, measured adoption and a roadmap.
• Service Catalog: Build a reliable system of record for our services and infrastructure, with ownership, relationships, and automated ingestion from source-of-truth systems rather than manual upkeep. A catalog nobody trusts is a catalog nobody uses.
• Integrations and Extensibility: Build the integrations that connect the portal to our cloud accounts, CI/CD systems, secrets management and internal APIs, and help document the patterns so other engineers can contribute integrations of their own.

• Work Within the Framework: Help shape the golden path framework and build within it, using the templates, scaffolding, standards and guardrails the team defines, with networking, security, observability and compliance pre-wired in so every path inherits them.
• Build the Provisioning Paths: Be one of the main builders of the Infrastructure Provisioning golden paths. They are also the reference implementations other teams copy, so the quality of your work sets what others follow.
• Support Other Teams: Many golden paths will be built by the teams that own the domain. Help them do that well through worked examples, documentation, pairing and reviewing their contributions.
• Incorporate What Exists: Reimagine today’s pipelines, internal UIs and documented procedures as portal-native journeys, some built here, many by the owning teams. Start from how they are actually used, not how they are written up.
• Retire the Old Path: Work with the teams who built these tools, since their buy-in decides whether a path is used or bypassed and they are often the right owners of the replacement. Decommission what it supersedes so the platform gets simpler over time.
• AI-native Platform: Help make the platform readable by AI coding agents as well as people, with structured metadata, documented interfaces and tooling agents can consume, so AI-assisted development meets Natera standards by default.

• Adoption First: Prove the first golden paths against real high-frequency workflows, support teams through onboarding, and prioritize on measured friction rather than preference.
• Measurable Standards: Help build the scorecards that make platform and compliance expectations visible, and work with consuming teams to close the gaps they surface.

• Platform Expertise: 5+ years in platform engineering, infrastructure, DevOps or SRE, including work on shared services used by more than one team. Solid AWS (IAM, multi-account, EKS), Terraform and Kubernetes, and experience building reusable CI/CD pipelines.
• Software Engineering: Strong programming ability in at least one modern language. You build and maintain production software with the testing, review and operational discipline that implies, not just scripts and configuration.
• Portal or Transferable Experience: Experience building or extending an internal developer portal, developer platform or comparable self-service tooling. Failing that, closely transferable automation experience plus clear motivation to take this on.
• Improving What Exists: Experience turning scattered internal capability into something more coherent and self-service, and the judgement to see when a workflow should be redesigned rather than wrapped in a new interface.
• Application Engineering: TypeScript and React, or equivalent application development experience in another modern language and framework. Prior exposure to this specific stack is not required. A strong engineer from another ecosystem who demonstrably picks up unfamiliar languages and frameworks quickly is equally well suited.
• Ownership Within a Team: You take a feature or workstream from design through to production and support it afterwards. You ask for input early, give useful code review, and work well with the teams whose systems you are changing.
• AI-Native Practice: Fluent day-to-day use of AI coding assistants and agentic tooling, interest in agent-accessible protocols such as MCP, and sound judgement about where AI accelerates platform work and where it does not.
• Platform as a Product: Treating internal engineers as customers, caring about adoption, and working in a regulated environment where change control, access review and audit evidence are encoded into automation rather than process.
• Communication: Clear writing. Design documents, ADRs and operational documentation others can act on.

• Hands-on experience with tools like Backstage or Port: catalog modelling, templating and scaffolding, custom actions, plugin development.
• Experience migrating or consolidating established internal tooling onto a common platform, including the deprecation work that follows.
• Docs-as-code systems such as TechDocs and MkDocs, and platform search integration.
• Operating a stateful web application in production (PostgreSQL, schema migrations, caching), and internal-platform authN/authZ with an external identity provider.
• Contributions to open-source platforms or developer-experience projects.