Foundation models transformed text and images. Structured data - the largest and most consequential data format in the world - stayed untouched, until now. What LLMs did for language, we're doing for tables.
We pioneered tabular foundation models: TabPFN v2 was a Nature cover story, has passed 3.5M+ downloads and 7,500+ GitHub stars, and runs in production from detecting lung disease with Oxford Cancer Analytics to preventing train failures with Hitachi. The hardest problems - millions of rows, real-time inference, entirely new modalities - are still open, and no one else is working on them at this level.
We're a small, highly selective team of 40+ with backgrounds from Google, DeepMind, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Jane Street, and CERN, led by Frank Hutter, Noah Hollmann, and Sauraj Gambhir, and advised by Bernhard Schölkopf and Turing Award winner Yann LeCun.
In July 2026, less than 18 months after our €9M pre-seed, we joined SAP as an independent frontier AI lab - same team, mission, and open-weights models, now backed by more than €1 billion over four years.
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 DoArchitect & 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.
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.
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.
Contributions to relevant open-source projects.
You'll work alongside researchers and builders who hold themselves to a very high bar - in the quality of their work and in how they work with each other. We move fast and still take the time to do things right.
Our teams are based in Berlin, Freiburg, and New York - when you're working on something as hard as TabPFN, being in the same room matters. But great people come from everywhere, and in exceptional cases we're open to remote, which usually means frequent travel to one of our offices. Wherever you're based, the whole company comes together regularly for offsites to build and celebrate together.
Our CommitmentsThe best products and teams are built by people with a wide range of perspectives and backgrounds. We welcome applications from all identities and walks of life - especially if you've ever felt discouraged by "not checking every box" - and provide equal opportunities regardless of gender, sexual orientation, origin, disability, or any other trait that makes you who you are.
We care about how your data is handled - see our Recruiting Data Privacy page
Skills Required
- 3+ years of professional experience in cloud engineering, data platform, or SRE role
- Experience building and maintaining data-intensive systems
- Strong experience with Infrastructure as Code using tools like Terraform
- Experience with containerization and orchestration technologies
- Proficiency in Python
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.
