Senior ML Engineer - Benchmarking & Tooling

About kaiko

In cancer care, treatment decisions can take many days—but patients don’t have that time. One of the reasons for delays? Cancer patients' data is scattered across many places: doctor’s notes, medical imagery, genomics data. At kaiko, we are developing AI foundation models to bring this data together and integrate it into clinical workflows, enabling doctors to make faster, more effective treatments decisions.

We also collaborate closely with the leading Dutch cancer research institute (NKI) on multiple AI research projects and a joint clinical validation initiative. In 2025, we plan on expanding our partnerships to even more hospitals.

We raised significant long-term funding and have offices in Zurich and Amsterdam. Over the past year, our team has nearly doubled in size, now comprising 80+ people from 25 countries and we just got recognized as a Rising Innovator at the GenAI conference

About the role

As a Senior ML Engineer specializing in Benchmarking & Tooling, you will build the data-driven backbone that supports our large and growing team of ML Researchers. Your mission is to create the 'single source of truth' for performance, making it effortless for our scientists to see the impact of their code changes and understand performance trends over time.

You will be responsible for creating and maintaining automated systems that continuously track, analyze, and report on our ML models and infrastructures, providing the critical data that guides our optimization efforts and infrastructure decisions. The role is based in Zurich.

Some areas of responsibility

• Benchmark Suite Development: Design, build, and maintain a standardized suite of benchmarks to continuously track model performance across different hardware configurations, software versions, and model architectures.

• Automation & Reporting: Automate the execution of benchmark suites within our CI/CD pipelines and develop clear, automated reporting dashboards to make performance data accessible and actionable for all stakeholders.

• Performance Evangelism: Document and disseminate best practices for writing high-performance, scalable ML code. Develop and lead internal workshops to elevate performance skills across the company.

• Infrastructure Collaboration: Act as a consultant to infrastructure teams by providing data-driven insights into GPU performance, helping to triage complex hardware vs. software issues.

About you

• Strong software engineering fundamentals with expert-level Python.

• Experience building and maintaining automated testing or benchmarking frameworks.

• A passion for creating robust, reliable, and well-documented systems that improve developer productivity and code quality.

• Proficiency with CI/CD systems (e.g., GitHub Actions) and data visualization tools for creating insightful dashboards.

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.