Senior legal counsel - AI and Healthcare

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

Our AI products are ready to scale, and our legal work is accelerating fast.

We’re partnering with more hospitals, signing new research and commercial agreements, and building cutting-edge AI tools that blend health data, foundation models, and complex software systems.

We’re looking for a Legal Counsel or Senior Legal Counsel who’s eager to own legal projects from start to finish. You’ll draft and negotiate contracts for newly developed products, craft pragmatic approaches to GDPR and IP challenges, and help turn our company’s ambition into executed agreements. You’ll have training and mentorship from the existing Legal team, but real ownership begins on day one.

This isn’t a role for traditional lawyers. We’re after a pragmatic contract lawyer with sharp analytical thinking, real curiosity about how AI is built, and the drive to take initiative in a fast-evolving startup.

This is a 32–40 hour per week position, based in the Netherlands. You'll spend about 50% of your time in our Amsterdam (Slotervaart) office and work closely with Business Development, Growth, Regulatory, Research, and our expanding Machine Learning and Infrastructure teams.

Some areas of responsibility

• You’ll conduct drafting, negotiation and execution of a wide range of contracts with international partners, from SaaS, licensing and research agreements to NDAs and highly customized hospital data-sharing agreements.

• You’ll help product and software engineering teams embed legal considerations early in their development cycles.

• You’ll support internal teams on legal questions related to data protection (GDPR), IP, and health- and AI-related regulations, with support from external DPO.

• You’ll manage legal work end-to-end, owning projects, gathering input from internal teams, drafting, negotiating with external parties, and presenting outcomes to management.

About you

• You’ve spent 3-10 years practicing law, ideally with some in-house experience in a fast-changing/high-complexity environment.

• You have a solid grounding in contract drafting and negotiation, and a good knowledge of GDPR.

• Experience with IP law, licensing, SaaS and/or hospital or research collaborations (PPS) is a plus.

• You’ve worked with researchers, engineers or product teams before, for instance at a software company or in the medical device industry.

• You have a hands-on, proactive approach. We don’t write memos, we set up meetings ourselves, gather information directly from relevant teams and get contracts drafted and signed.

• You have excellent English communication skills.

• You follow what’s happening in AI, from policy headlines to ethical implications, and are using AI-applications regularly. You’re excited to learn on the job how AI is actually developed.

We don’t expect you to know everything. But we do expect you to be ambitious, adaptable, and hungry to learn.

If you believe the law should unlock innovation, then please apply! - even if you don’t fit every single qualification.

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.

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.