Who We Are: Prior Labs is building breakthrough foundation models that understand spreadsheets and databases - the backbone of science and business. Foundation models have transformed text and images, but structured data has remained largely untouched. We're tackling this $100B+ opportunity to revolutionize how we approach scientific discovery, medical research, financial modeling, and business intelligence.
Our Momentum: We're the world-leading organization working on structured data, and we're accelerating fast. Our TabPFN v2 model, recently published in Nature, sets the new state-of-the-art for structured data. We've hit 2.2M+ downloads, 5,000+ GitHub stars, and growth is accelerating. We're now building the next generation of models that combine AI advancements with specialized architectures for structured data.
What's Next: With €9M in pre-seed funding from top-tier investors and backing from leaders at Hugging Face, DeepMind, and Silo AI, we're scaling fast and building our team. This is the moment to join: help us shape the future of structured data AI. Read our manifesto.
About the roleYou will have ownership over designing, building, and scaling the core infrastructure that brings Prior Labs' foundation models to the world. This is a unique opportunity to make fundamental architectural decisions, establish engineering best practices from the ground up, and profoundly shape the technical direction for serving state-of-the-art AI.
You'll work directly with world-class AI researchers, translating cutting-edge models into reliable, scalable production systems. This role offers significant autonomy and impact, with clear paths to specialize in areas you're passionate about (like ML infrastructure or core backend systems) or grow into a technical leadership position as our team expands. You won't just be implementing features; you'll be building the backbone of our company.
What You'll Do:
Architect & Design: Design robust, scalable, and secure backend systems and production-grade APIs for serving and finetuning our foundation models.
Build & Implement: Develop high-quality, maintainable code (Python/FastAPI experience highly valued) for core backend services.
Own Infrastructure: Design, deploy, and manage core infrastructure on cloud platforms, focusing on reliability, monitoring, observability, and cost-efficiency.
Core MLOps Concepts: Understanding of the entire machine learning lifecycle (MLLC) from data ingestion and preparation to model deployment, monitoring, and retraining.
Ensure Compliance & Security: Implement secure, GDPR-compliant systems, including data storage, access control, usage tracking, and quota management.
Champion Best Practices: Drive high standards for testing, CI/CD, documentation, and security within the engineering team.
Qualifications:
3+ years of professional experience in a cloud engineering, data platform, or SRE role, with a proven track record of managing production infrastructure.
Proven experience building and maintaining data-intensive systems, with a strong understanding of data modeling, storage, and processing technologies.
Strong, hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using tools like Terraform.
Significant experience with containerization and orchestration technologies (Docker, Kubernetes).
Proficiency in Python.
What Sets You Apart:
Experience building or managing infrastructure specifically for machine learning (MLOps, model serving frameworks, feature stores, data pipelines).
Hands-on experience with modern data warehousing and processing platforms like Databricks, Snowflake, or BigQuery.
Experience in a technical leadership or mentorship role.
Contributions to relevant open-source projects.
Offices in Freiburg, Germany - a university city at the edge of the Black Forest, Switzerland and France, and Berlin—a global tech hub and one of Europe’s most dynamic cities
Competitive compensation package with meaningful equity
30 days of paid vacation + public holidays
Comprehensive benefits including healthcare, transportation, and fitness
Work with state-of-the-art ML architecture, substantial compute resources and with a world-class team
Top Skills
What We Do
Prior Labs is building breakthrough foundation models that understand spreadsheets and databases - the lifeblood of science and business. While foundation models have transformed text and images, tabular data has remained largely untouched. We're tackling this opportunity to revolutionize how we approach scientific discovery, medical research, financial modeling, and business intelligence.
Backed by Balderton Capital, XTX Ventures, SAP Founder Hans Werner-Hector's Hector Foundation, Atlantic Labs, Galion.exe and top AI leaders such as Peter Sarlin, Guy Podjarny, Thomas Wolf, Ed Grefenstette, Robin Rombach, Christopher Lynch and Ash Kulkarni.
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