Head of Engineering – Production & Operations
KaikoJobsCloseBy Editorial Insights
Kaiko is hiring a Head of Engineering for Production & Operations to run reliability and capacity for SaaS and hybrid platforms as ML driven compute grows, shaping production readiness, on call models, and incident response while empowering product and ML engineering teams to own and operate services, reporting to the VP of Engineering and partnering with senior leaders. The role is based in The Netherlands or Switzerland with at least 50 percent time in the office. To apply, emphasize experience operating production systems at scale in SaaS or hybrid environments, a calm, clear decision style during incidents, and a track record of enabling teams rather than bottlenecking them, plus strong collaboration, ownership and ambition with measurable outcomes.
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 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.