Head of Engineering

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.

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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!

At kaiko, we believe the…