Associate Director, Service Engineering

Description

This role leads reliability, availability, and operational excellence for the lab-facing platforms of the company, covering clinical systems, laboratory equipment workflows, and data pipelines in a regulated healthcare setting.

You will lead a team that keeps production running, handles incidents, and tracks service health. You will work closely with Production Engineering, Lab Operations, Bioinformatics, Infrastructure, Facilities, and Compliance to support genetic testing and diagnostics.

Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of Service Engineers and SREs that supports clinical production systems.
• Set clear expectations for ownership, on-call readiness, and operational excellence.
• Run hiring, onboarding, performance management, and career development.
• Build a blameless, learning culture centered on patient impact and reliability.
• Own reliability and availability of production services used for lab operations, reporting, and customer delivery.
• Define and manage SLAs, SLOs, and operational KPIs that match clinical and business priorities.
• Lead major incident response with fast triage, clear communication, and thorough post-incident reviews.
• Oversee on-call rotations, escalation paths, and operational playbooks.
• Make sure new assays, pipelines, and platform capabilities are operationally ready at go-live.
• Work with Engineering and Development to design resilient, fault-tolerant systems.
• Drive best practices for monitoring, alerting, logging, and observability across lab and cloud platforms.
• Reduce operational toil through automation, tooling, and process changes.
• Raise reliability, performance, and scalability requirements early in the development lifecycle.
• Serve as the main operational contact for Lab Operations, Bioinformatics, Engineering, and Development.
• Turn clinical, regulatory, and operational needs into technical reliability requirements.
• Give executives clear updates on service health, incidents, and risk mitigation plans.
• Make sure systems meet HIPAA, CLIA, CAP, and SOX requirements.
• Work with Quality and Compliance on audits, access controls, change management, and incident response.
• Own disaster recovery and business continuity planning, including periodic testing for critical systems.
• Make sure production changes follow validated, compliant release processes.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience in service engineering or engineering roles.
• 5+ years of people management experience leading technical teams.
• Strong experience running highly available, mission-critical production systems.
• Proven skill in incident management and root cause analysis.
• Hands-on experience with CMMS and LIMS environments.
• Strong written and verbal communication, especially under high-stakes pressure.
• Preferred: experience in healthcare, biotech, or other regulated environments.
• Preferred: familiarity with laboratory information systems (LIMS), data pipelines, or bioinformatics workflows.
• Preferred: experience with infrastructure and automation tools.
• Preferred: experience defining SLOs and SLAs for systems with clinical or patient impact.

Conditions

Equal opportunity employer that welcomes candidates of all backgrounds, experiences, abilities, and perspectives.

Benefits

• Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, life, and disability plans for eligible employees and dependents.
• Free testing and fertility care benefits for employees and their immediate families.
• Pregnancy and baby bonding leave, 401k, commuter benefits, and an employee referral program.