Data ML Engineering Lead

kaiko.ai; Amsterdam; Hybrid; EUR 80,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Good pension plan

25 vacation days per year

EUR 1000 learning and development budget

Annual commuting subsidy

Job summary

A technology company specializing in medical data is looking for an ML Data Engineering Lead in Amsterdam. This hybrid role involves leading technical teams, owning data architectures, and collaborating with ML researchers to enhance data systems. Candidates should have strong leadership skills and expertise in Python and large-scale data pipelines. The position offers competitive salary and benefits, including vacation days and a learning budget.

Qualifications

• Experience leading technical teams and managing engineers.
• Proven ownership of long-term architectural decisions in data pipelines.
• Deep experience with data quality experimentation and synthetic data generation.

Responsibilities

• Drive technical execution on core data systems while coaching your team.
• Collaborate with ML research lead to align infrastructure with research priorities.
• Design scalable architectures and prioritize experiments for data leverage.

Skills

Leadership and team management

Designing large-scale data pipelines

Python programming

Experience with Ray or Spark

Tools

Dagster

Data-quality validation frameworks

Job description

kaiko.ai Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands

About the role

Kaiko’s Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) is trained on domain-specific, high-complexity medical data. To reach clinical-grade performance, we’ll need to ramp up our data efforts to manage massive scale, ensure consistent quality, and tightly control data relevance and integrity.

As our ML Data Engineering Lead, you’ll directly drive this frontier. You’ll own a significant portion of our data roadmap and steer the technical direction of our ingestion, generation, and filtering pipelines. You’ll work closely with the ML research lead to align infrastructure with research priorities, design scalable architectures, and prioritize experiments that increase our data leverage.

This is both a managerial and hands-on position, which means you’ll drive technical execution on core data systems while coaching your team and enabling your reports to grow.

You will be based in Zurich or Amsterdam, with the expectation of spending at least 3 days a week at the office.

About you

• You’ve led technical teams before: hiring, coaching, and developing engineers to do their best work.
• You’ve owned technical direction for large-scale data pipelines, making long-term architectural decisions around ingestion, synthetic data generation, and filtering that aligned with company and research priorities.
• You have deep experience designing and operating large-scale data pipelines, including synthetic data generation for LLMs, data-quality experimentation, and core data primitives like hashing, deduplication, and chunking.
• You still have excellent programming skills in Python and deep experience with distributed frameworks such as Ray or Spark.

Nice to have:

• Hands‑on production experience orchestrating complex DAGs in Dagster (preferred) or similar workflow engines.
• Expertise in data‑quality & validation frameworks and monitoring/observability tooling.
• Strong grasp of machine‑learning fundamentals (model architectures, training paradigms, evaluation metrics) to collaborate deeply with researchers and guide data‑driven choices.

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 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 is designed to assess mutual fit across skills, motivation, and values. It typically includes the following steps (though it will be more extensive for leadership positions):

• Screening call: A short 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.

Seniority level

• Director

Employment type

• Full-time

Job function

• Industries: Technology, Information and Internet and Hospitals and Health Care

Our team values collaboration and initiative. This role is open to candidates who can contribute to building better products to support patients and researchers.