About kaiko

Delivering high quality cancer care is complex; specialists form a view of each patient's condition by reasoning across different data - CT scans, genomics context, treatment history and clinical notes.

Current AI are powerful within domains but fall short when it comes to reasoning across data or domain areas. kaiko.w, our AI assistant for oncology, aims to equip every clinician with a full understanding of their patients, helping them to reason across data as they assess each case.

We’re building this in close collaboration with the Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI) and a growing network of hospitals and research centers. We’ve raised significant long-term funding and have nearly doubled our team over the past year. We’re now 80+ people representing 25 nationalities, based across our offices in Zurich and Amsterdam.

About the role

We’re looking for exceptional data and software engineering leaders who thrive at the intersection of data systems and product software development. This role combines interdisciplinary technical depth with product awareness - leading the design of data foundations that power intelligent products, analytics, and AI capabilities at scale.

You will be based in either The Netherlands or Switzerland, with the expectation of spending at least 50% of your time at the office.

Some areas of responsibility

• You’ll architect and scale our core data systems - from ingestion and transformation to storage and serving - ensuring data is discoverable, reliable, and production-ready.

• You’ll own the data-product interface: build systems that enable our AI products to consume, modify, and act on high-quality data.

• You’ll mentor and grow a team of data, software and analytics engineers, guiding technical design, process rigor, and culture of continuous improvement.

About you

• You have led technical teams before: hiring, coaching, and developing engineers to do their best work.

• You have owned technical direction for product data and backend systems, making long-term architectural decisions around ingestion, backend and storage systems that align with company and product priorities.

• You have blended experience in software engineering and data engineering and you care about code quality and engineering practices.

• You have deep experience in data modeling, distributed data processing, storage and orchestration tools, ideally using programming languages like Python with tools like Dagster, Airflow, dbt, or Spark and infrastructure as code using Kubernetes.

You’ll thrive here if you

• See data systems as living organisms - evolving, decaying, and improving through stewardship.

• Believe in contract-based collaboration between producers and consumers of data.

• Think in systems: designing for reliability, discoverability, and feedback loops.

• Balance strategic thinking with hands-on engineering.

• Care about creating leverage - making data work visible, reusable, and empowering.

We are excited to gather a broad range of perspectives in our team, as we believe it will help us build better products to support a broader set of people. If you’re excited about us but don’t fit every single qualification, we still encourage you to apply: we’ve had incredible team members join us who didn’t check every box!

Why kaiko

At kaiko, we believe the best ideas come from collaboration, ownership and ambition. We’ve built a team of international experts where your work has direct impact. Here’s what we value:

• Ownership: You’ll have the autonomy to set your own goals, make critical decisions, and see the direct impact of your work.

• Collaboration: You’ll have to approach disagreement with curiosity, build on common ground and create solutions together.

• Ambition: You’ll be surrounded by people who set high standards for themselves and others, who see obstacles as opportunities, and who are relentless in their work to create better outcomes for patients.

 
In addition, we offer

• An attractive and competitive salary, a good pension plan and 25 vacation days per year.

• Great offsites and team events to strengthen the team and celebrate successes together.

• A EUR 1000 learning and development budget to help you grow.

• Autonomy to do your work the way that works best for you, whether you have a kid or prefer early mornings.

• An annual commuting subsidy.

Our interview process

Our interview process is designed to assess mutual fit across skills, motivation, and values. It typically includes the following steps:

• Screening call: A short conversation to align on your motivation, career goals, and initial fit for the role.

• Technical interview: A deep dive into your problem-solving approach through a technical challenge, case study, or role-specific scenario.

• Onsite meeting (optional): You’ll meet team members across functions to explore collaboration dynamics, team fit, and day-to-day context.

• Final executive conversation: A discussion with a member of the executive team focused on long-term alignment, cultural fit, and shared expectations for impact.