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Prior Labs is a frontier AI company pioneering tabular foundation models—applying to structured data what LLMs did for language. TabPFN v2, published in Nature, has 3.5M+ downloads and powers production systems at Oxford Cancer Analytics and Hitachi. The company is a 40+ person team of researchers and engineers from Google, DeepMind, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Jane Street, and CERN, led by Frank Hutter, Noah Hollmann, and Sauraj Gambhir, advised by Bernhard Schölkopf and Turing Award winner Yann LeCun. In July 2026, Prior Labs joined SAP as an independent frontier AI lab, backed by €1 billion+ over four years.
You will be Prior Labs' first dedicated engineering leader, reporting to the CTO with direct access to founders. Today the engineering team is small and very senior; your mandate is to build and scale it substantially over the next 18 months. This is a hands-on operator role focused on organizational velocity rather than headcount maximization.
Key responsibilities:
- Directly manage and grow the engineering team, including building out the management layer
- Build the hiring machine: run hiring operations, design interview loops, maintain high bar during growth
- Own engineering standards and velocity: code review, testing, shipping practices, and leverage of AI coding tools
- Own security and compliance (SOC 2, GDPR, ISO 27001) at appropriate scale
- Lead the engineering side of SAP collaboration
- Treat the deployment layer as a product surface: managed API, customer VPCs, self-hosted open weights—with customer empathy
- Act as sparring partner to founders on org design and engineering direction
The role is based in Berlin, with offices also in Freiburg and New York. Teams are co-located when working on hard problems, but exceptional candidates may work remotely with frequent travel to offices.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Have directly led an engineering organization of 10+ people, including through managers or leads, with concrete examples of how you built it
- Have owned platform or infrastructure scope at scale: serving, APIs, availability, cloud and vendor budgets
- Have operated under SOC 2 / ISO-style audit regimes (having built or run the function is a plus)
- Have worked in both startups and large organizations—can create structure from scratch and hold your own with a very large partner
DESIRABLE EXPERIENCE:
- Scaled an engineering org through a real growth phase (25 to 60+ people or similar), building the management layer
- Led engineering through an acquisition, working directly with the parent company
- Led engineering in a research- or ML-heavy organization, bridging research and production code without slowing research
- Personally changed how your team works with AI coding tools and can demonstrate the impact
