SeniorFull TimeEN
kaiko 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 senior data engineer who combines strong data systems expertise with solid software engineering skills. This role focuses on building the data foundations for 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
Architect and scale data systems: Ingest, transform, store, and serve data to ensure discoverability, reliability, and readiness for production.
Develop the data-product interface: Design systems that enable our AI products to manipulate and act on high-quality data.
Contribute technical design expertise and support process improvements within the data, software, and AI engineering teams.
About you
Are experienced in evolving and owning technical direction: Responsible for product data and backend systems, making design decisions that align with company priorities.
Blended background in software and data engineering with a focus on code quality and best practices.
Are skilled in data modeling and distributed data processing using tools like Dagster, Airflow, dbt, or Spark and infrastructure management with Kubernetes.
You’ll thrive here if you:
View data systems as evolving entities requiring stewardship.
Advocate for contract-based collaboration in data production and consumption.
Have strong systems thinking skills, focusing on reliability and feedback loops.
Can balance strategic planning with practical implementation.
Are passionate about 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.
Online coding assessment: focused on core programming skills, problem-solving ability, and fundamental data structures and algorithms.
Coding assessment review: follow-up discussion to review your submission.
System design interview: A deep dive into your problem-solving approach and an opportunity to further showcase your skills and experience.
Final onsite meeting: A discussion with the team lead focused on long-term alignment, cultural fit, and shared expectations for impact.
