Staff Machine Learning Scientist - Translational AI

Staff Machine Learning Scientist - Translational AI

Position Summary

Natera is seeking aStaff Machine Learning Scientist – Translational AIto provide technical leadership at the intersection of biomedical foundation models, computational biology, and clinical translation. This role is responsible for shaping how genomic, pathology and multimodal foundation models are applied to high-impact translational problems, including target identification, drug and biomarker discovery, patient stratification, and therapeutic development.

As a Staff-level scientist, you will operate with broad technical autonomy, influencing modeling strategy across multiple initiatives while remaining hands-on in model development, experimentation, and interpretation. You will work closely with AI scientists, translational scientists, bioinformatics, clinical partners, and ML engineers to ensure foundation models deliverbiologically grounded and clinically meaningful insights.

Key Responsibilities

Scientific Leadership in Translational AI

• Serve as a scientific and technical authority on theapplication of molecular, genomic and pathology foundation modelsto translational and clinical questions.
  
  

• Define modeling strategies that bridge pretrained foundation models and downstream translational use cases.
  
  

• Review and elevate modeling approaches used by other scientists through technical feedback and mentorship.
  
  

Foundation Models to Biological & Clinical Translation

• Lead the application and post-training of foundation models (deep sequence, multimodal, representation learning) for biomarker discovery, outcome prediction, molecular recurrence modeling, and therapy response assessment.
  
  

• Design fine-tuning, probing, and representation analysis workflows that extractbiologically interpretable signalsfrom large models.
  
  

• Ensure modeling outputs are aligned with biological plausibility, clinical relevance, and downstream decision-making needs.
  
  

Modeling, Experimentation & Evaluation

• Build and evaluate advanced ML models across genomics, transcriptomics, ctDNA, imaging, and clinical metadata.
  
  

• Design clinical investigation and evaluation frameworks that connect model performance totranslational utility, robustness, and real-world constraints.
  
  

• Identify failure modes, sources of bias, and uncertainty, and propose mitigation strategies appropriate for clinical-facing applications.
  
  

Cross-Functional Collaboration & Influence

• Partner deeply with translational science, bioinformatics, medical, and clinical teams to frame high-value AI questions.
  
  

• Act as a technical bridge between research, platform, and engineering teams to ensure scalable and reproducible workflows.
  
  

• Contribute to external collaborations and strategic partnerships related to foundation models and translational AI.
  
  

Scientific Communication & External Presence

• Drive scientific storytelling around translational AI efforts through internal reviews, leadership updates, and external-facing materials.
  
  

• Contribute to peer-reviewed publications, conference submissions, and invited talks.
  
  

• Help establish Natera’s external reputation infoundation models for translational medicine.
  
  

Qualifications / Experience

• PhD in Computational Biology, Bioinformatics, Computer Science, or a related quantitative field.
  
  

• 5+ yearsof experience applying ML to biological, genomic, or clinical data, in the field of oncology, immunology, or translational medicine..
  
  

• Deep experience withfoundation models, representation learning, self-supervised learning, or deep sequence models.
  
  

• Demonstrated ability to translate ML outputs intobiological insight or clinical value, not just metrics.
  
  

• Strong proficiency in PyTorch and modern ML tooling (e.g., HuggingFace transformers, PEFT, Captum, MLFow).
  
  

• Track record of scientific and technical leadership through project ownership, mentorship, or cross-team influence.
  

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience integrating genomics with imaging or clinical data in multimodal foundation models.
  
  

• Experience with drug discovery, clinical trial data, real-world evidence, or regulatory-facing analyses.
  
  

• Strong publication record in ML, computational biology, or translational research venues.
  
  

The pay range is listed and actual compensation packages are based on a wide array of factors unique to each candidate, including but not limited to skill set, years & depth of experience, certifications and specific office location. This may differ in other locations due to cost of labor considerations.

Remote USA

$124,800—$156,000 USD

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, visitwww.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, nation...