Head of Engineering – Production & Operations
About kaiko
kaiko.ai is building a next-generation agentic clinical AI assistant that helps clinicians reason across patient data, guidelines, and diagnostics.
Healthcare decisions are rarely made by a single person or from a single data source. kaiko’s assistant maintains longitudinal patient context across encounters, clinicians, and institutions, enabling collaboration, second opinions, and complex diagnostic workflows. The system is designed to operate safely in real clinical environments, with human oversight, auditability, and regulatory alignment at its core.
Our assistant core supports broadly applicable clinical tasks such as patient data navigation, guideline interaction, multimodal interaction (chat and voice), and care coordination. On top of this foundation, we are developing specialized diagnostic agents in areas such as oncology, radiology, and pathology.
We build in close collaboration with leading hospitals and research centers, including the Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI). kaiko is a well-funded company with a growing international team, operating from Zurich and Amsterdam.
About the role
We’re looking for a Head of Engineering – Production & Operations to lead how we run our SaaS and hybrid SaaS platforms as our customer base, workloads, and ML-driven compute demands continue to grow.
This role focuses on operational excellence at scale: ensuring production reliability, scalable capacity, and effective incident response — while enabling product and ML engineering teams to confidently own and operate their services.
You will work closely with the VP of Engineering and senior engineering leaders, combining people leadership, service orientation, systems thinking, and cross-team coordination.
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
Ensure the reliability and resilience of our SaaS and hybrid SaaS platforms at an organizational level. Coordinate effective incident response and support clear decision-making, while preserving strong ownership within teams.
Provide leadership and mentorship across infrastructure, operations, and related functions. Align priorities and clarify interfaces to enable the teams to operate cohesively and deliver reliably.
Guide the evolution of our developer experience and release engineering fostering shared principles for safe and scalable delivery.
Establish clear production readiness expectations, on-call models, and operational standards, working collaboratively with product and platform leaders to embed operability into system design and planning.
Coordinate long-term infrastructure and compute strategy — especially for ML and inference workloads — balancing reliability, performance, and cost in alignment with engineering leadership.
About you
Experienced in operating production systems at scale — you’ve led or owned reliability, operations, or platform engineering for complex, customer-facing systems, ideally in SaaS or hybrid environments.
Strong people and technical leadership — You’re comfortable managing senior engineers and teams while remaining deeply involved in systems-level decision-making and tradeoffs.
Systems thinker with operational instincts — You understand how architecture, infrastructure, ML workloads, and product behavior interact under real-world conditions.
Clear, calm decision-maker — You’re effective during incidents and high-stakes situations, able to prioritize, communicate clearly, and make tradeoffs visible.
Collaborative and enabling by default — You raise standards without becoming a bottleneck and believe teams should own what they run, supported by strong operational foundations.
You’ll thrive here if you:
View production systems as evolving entities that require stewardship, not just tooling
Care deeply about reliability, feedback loops, and learning from failure
Balance long-term operational strategy with hands-on execution
Prefer enabling teams over centralizing control
Enjoy working across organizational boundaries to solve systemic problems
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:
Culture Fit & Leadership Interview: A 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: 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.
- Locations
- Amsterdam, Zürich (Puls 5)
- Remote status
- Hybrid
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