Senior Manager, Network Operations

Natera is seeking a hands-on, highly accountable Senior Manager of Network Operations to be our Austin site lead. This position will lead the day-to-day operations, reliability, and continuous improvement of a global enterprise network supporting critical healthcare and genomic operations.

This role is responsible for managing a distributed network operations team, ensuring high availability across LAN, WAN, wireless, firewall, cloud, and on-premise environments. The Senior Manager will partner closely with Infrastructure, Information Security, DevOps, Engineering, and Lab/Business Operations teams to support a secure, scalable, and resilient network environment.

The ideal candidate brings strong technical depth, operational discipline, and people leadership experience. This individual will help execute network modernization initiatives, improve observability and incident response, maintain compliance with change management and regulatory controls, and ensure the network team delivers consistent, reliable support to the business.

Key Responsibilities

• Manage the stability, performance, security, and availability of Natera’s global enterprise network, including LAN, WAN, SD-WAN, wireless, firewalls, VPN, cloud, and on-premise environments.

• Lead a team of network engineers, providing coaching, prioritization, and technical guidance.

• Execute network operations initiatives aligned with the broader IT infrastructure strategy, including automation, resiliency, lifecycle management, and performance improvements.

• Serve as an escalation point for high-severity network incidents, coordinating troubleshooting, communication, root cause analysis, and service restoration.

• Remain hands-on with network design, configuration, troubleshooting, optimization, and implementation activities as needed.

• Partner with Information Security on firewall policy management, segmentation, remote access, vulnerability remediation, and secure network architecture practices.

• Support network capacity planning, hardware/software lifecycle refreshes, redundancy improvements, and operational risk reduction efforts.

• Improve monitoring, alerting, and observability practices using tools such as SolarWinds, LogicMonitor, Wireshark, NetFlow, SNMP, and related platforms.

• Ensure network changes follow established change management, documentation, compliance, and operational governance processes.

• Maintain and improve operational KPIs such as uptime, incident volume, MTTR, change success rate, alert quality, and recurring issue reduction.

• Support vendor management activities, including technical reviews, support escalations, renewals, and service performance discussions.

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to support business growth, new site deployments, cloud connectivity, application performance, and infrastructure modernization efforts.

Technical Skill Requirements

Strong hands-on experience with:

• Enterprise network operations, troubleshooting, implementation, and support across hybrid cloud and on-premise environments.

• Routing and switching technologies, including BGP, OSPF, EIGRP, VLANs, VRFs, STP, Layer 2/Layer 3 design, and high-availability network topologies.

• Next-generation firewalls, preferably Palo Alto Networks.

• Wireless networking, preferably Cisco Meraki.

• VPN technologies, IPSec, GRE, NAT, QoS, load balancing, and secure remote access solutions.

• Monitoring and diagnostic tools such as SolarWinds, LogicMonitor, Wireshark, NetFlow, SNMP, and related observability platforms.

• Network platforms including Juniper, Palo Alto Networks, Cisco Meraki, and Opengear.

• Cloud networking concepts, preferably within AWS environments.

• Network documentation, standards, change control, incident management, and operational runbooks.

Certifications

• Required:
   

  • Bachelors degree in Technical Field or Equivalent

  • CCNP or equivalent enterprise networking certification, or comparable hands-on experience.
     

• Strongly Preferred:
   

  • CCIE or equivalent expert-level networking certification.

  • Juniper JNCIP or JNCIE.

  • Palo Alto PCNSE.

  • AWS Certified Advanced Networking Specialty.

  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional.

  • ITIL Foundation v3/v4.

  • Experience working in a HIPAA-regulated biotech, pharma, healthcare, or life sciences enterprise.

Leadership Experience

• 5+ years of experience in enterprise network engineering, network operations, or infrastructure operations.

• 5+ years of experience leading or managing technical network teams.

• Experience managing on-call rotations, escalation processes, incident response workflows, and operational support models.

• Demonstrated ability to coach engineers, set priorities, improve team execution, and maintain accountability.

• Ability to balance hands-on technical work with team leadership, operational planning, and cross-functional coordination.

• Experience supporting high-availability environments where uptime, security, and compliance are critical.

Expected Outcomes: First 6–12 Months

• Improve network operational stability by identifying recurring issues and driving corrective actions.

• Strengthen incident response, escalation paths, documentation, and root cause analysis practices.

• Improve monitoring, alert quality, and visibility into network health and performance.

• Support execution of the network modernization roadmap in partnership with the Director of IT Infrastructure and architecture stakeholders.

• Establish or refine operational metrics for uptime, MTTR, change success rate, incident trends, and recurring issue reduction.

• Improve team structure, prioritization, accountability, and day-to-day execution.

Reporting & Stakeholder Alignment

• Reports to the Director of IT Infrastructure.

• Works closely with Information Security, DevOps, Engineering, Application Delivery, Facilities, and Business Operations teams.

• Provides regular updates to IT leadership on network health, incidents, risks, project status, and operational performance.

• Supports business and technology stakeholders by ensuring reliable, secure, and scalable network services.