Senior Backend Engineer

Senior Backend Engineer About kaiko.ai 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 The role sits within the team responsible for kaiko’s core product: the agentic AI assistant that clinicians use to reason across patient data, guidelines, and diagnostics. As we strive to offer a state-of-the-art system, our main challenge is ensuring that kaiko’s product offers the best possible experience for our users, while maintaining strict compliance with all regulatory requirements of the medical field. The role of the Backend team is to develop and maintain these features in close collaboration with the Frontend, Infrastructure, ML and Data teams. A Senior Backend Engineer takes ownership of shipping features, plays an active role in shaping technical requirements, and ensures that quality standards and product stability are maintained. 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 will develop and maintain Backend services using Python (FastAPI), Helm, Kubernetes, ArgoCD, and Postgres. You will own the delivery of Backend work as part of focused, interdisciplinary, feature-driven squads. You will take an active role in offering support to other internal teams. You will leverage your experience in shaping and refining our development practices. About you You have a minimum of 5 years of experience in delivering high-quality software and maintaining it in production. You have a strong grasp of software engineering fundamentals, and you can effectively reason about best practices and tradeoffs in software architecture. You are product-driven, and you own your deliverables: you look to understand the real value that a feature brings to the end-user, and you make sure that it gets implemented properly end-to-end. You communicate proactively: you ensure the relevant stakeholders are updated, and that issues or uncertainties are surfaced early. You are pragmatic, fact-driven, and can deal with ambiguity. You challenge assumptions, and you strive to solve ambiguity instead of accepting it. You advocate for your ideas with conviction, but you let evidence and product impact decide the outcome, not personal preference or familiarity. You have experience working with Python (FastAPI), Docker, Helm, Kubernetes, ArgoCD, and Postgres, or with similar technologies. You have strong understanding of cloud-native principles and best practices, with experience delivering scalable and resilient solutions on at least one major public cloud platform Nice to have: You have experience working within a dynamic, fast-growth scale-up environment. You have experience working in a highly regulated field, such as the medical field, where compliance is critical. You have experience working on an AI-adjacent product. 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 a 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, professional 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 and shared expectations for impact. Department Engineering Role Product Engineering Locations Amsterdam Remote status Hybrid Amsterdam