About Kaiko

Today's hospitals operate in an era of opportunity that is driven by data. Beginning with the digitization of health records, but now coupled with emerging technologies such as genomic sequencing and wearable medical devices, data has become a vast resource in healthcare and life sciences.

Kaiko operates within this environment and with a clear vision: to redefine how hospitals harness their data to revolutionize patient care, clinical research and operational effectiveness. This starts with their core offering, a data- and AI platform which centralizes a hospital’s data from siloed systems, provides access at scale and enables cloud computing, storage and AI technology. Secure sharing, better data governance and privacy are fundamental to their offering. In Kaiko’s vision this platform will accommodate a large variety of use-cases across the healthcare ecosystem, including AI development and AI integration in the hospital.

Founded in 2021 and majority owned by the Hartwig Foundation, Kaiko has since established a partnership with one of the leading cancer institutes in The Netherlands (NKI-AVL) and is expanding to other hospitals across the globe. With offices in both Amsterdam and Zürich, Kaiko unites data scientists, software engineers and medical experts.

Our culture

At Kaiko, we have an open, creative and non-hierarchical work atmosphere which offers continuous learning and direct impact in return for accountability and team spirit.

We offer flexibility - for instance, through remote working – alongside an expectation for managing and delivering your own goals; our team’s ownership, passion and shared commitment to improving health outcomes through data is something that sets us apart.

At the intersection of healthcare and data we recognize the implications on wellbeing and trust and approach our work with the utmost sensitivity. Data privacy, compliance and security are core to everything we do. Our open, creative environment gives talented people room to explore new ideas and we reward this with an attractive package and opportunities for further personal development. 

About the role

We are looking for a Senior Platform Engineer to build and manage a cloud-native petascale data & compute platform. You will contribute to the storage, compute and network infrastructure components. Furthermore, you'll participate in incident management and ensuring security (all layers of the stack, patching, vulnerability scanning, IDS/IPS/SIEM) of the platform.

As part of an interdisciplinary R&D team you will work in close collaboration with computational biologists, machine learning scientists and software engineers. We apply modern engineering practices to build reliable, maintainable, scalable, and secure systems. Your contributions will enable data-centric AI and drive our mission to diagnose and treat cancer at its most actionable and early stages.

This role is based in either The Netherlands or Switzerland.

How you will contribute

You will be part of the team that owns our Data & Compute Platform which is the backbone of our Multimodal AI & Data Analytics platform, our R&D infrastructure and business applications.

 Reliability & Scalability

• Develop and extend the building blocks of our Infrastructure as Code (IaC) terraform codebase;
• Improve reliability and scalability of our AI and ML platform as we build out new features and onboard customers;
• Monitor and troubleshoot infrastructure issues, including performance and availability.

 Collaboration

• Design and implement cloud infrastructure to support efficient ML training and serving;
• Build and deploy services on workload-aware orchestration technologies like Kubernetes;
• Collaborate with development teams to optimize infrastructure and improve application performance.

 Security

• Develop and improve Governance policies to ensure the platform meets high standards of security and compliance requirements;
• Implement and maintain disaster recovery and business continuity plans.

 Growth

• Keep up to date with industry best practices and evaluate emerging technologies in cloud and ML infrastructure;
• Learn the machine learning necessary to optimize training performance across multiple scales of hardware.

What you need to be successful in this role

• 6+ years of experience managing production infrastructure, automation, and software engineering;
• Bachelor’s (or higher) in computer science or comparable experience in a related technical field;
• Good understanding of Linux internals and working of containerization technologies;
• Demonstrate strong understanding of cloud-based storage services and distributed storage systems;
• Experience building and managing secure multi-tenant Kubernetes cluster.
• Proficient in at least one high-level programming language like Python, Go, Rust etc.;
• Hands-on using IaC tools like Terraform, Pulumi etc. for managing cloud infrastructure;
• Working experience with configuration management tools like Helm, kustomize, jsonnet etc.;
• Demonstrate strong analytical and troubleshooting skills with large scale distributed systems;
• Effective communication and collaboration skills and a powerful desire to own and drive your work.

Nice to have

Experience with/in:

• managing large scale infrastructure on Azure;
• working in a regulated domain/industry;
• building AI/ML training and inference platforms like Ray, MLflow, Kubeflow etc.;
• working in projects with large open-ended scope;
• architecting data lake and data warehouse storage systems;
• monorepo and pants build system;
• GitOps and related CI/CD tooling.

This Senior Platform Engineer position is a full-time role. It is important for the applicant to be a resident in The Netherlands or Switzerland, have a valid work permit and preferably be within commutable distance from our offices in Amsterdam or Zürich. Given the nature of Kaiko’s business and the fact that it deals with sensitive data, a Certificate of Conduct will be required upon finalizing the employment contract.

Our offer

• An inspirational, extremely talented and internationally diverse team which ‘builds a submarine whilst also operating it’ and loves doing that
• A unique working experience in a fast-growing company which intends to revolutionize healthcare
• Autonomy, flexibility and the opportunity to do your work in the way it works best to you, as long as you deliver on your responsibilities
• An attractive and competitive salary, a good pension plan and 25 vacation days per year
• We value your personal & professional development; together we decide how we can support your growth.

Want to join Kaiko as Senior Platform Engineer – Storage and Compute ? Send us your application online and we will contact you as soon as possible. At Kaiko we welcome everyone with equal enthusiasm. Should you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at recruitment@kaiko.ai and/or visit Kaiko online at www.kaiko.ai