Legal Counsel

WHO WE ARE

Foundation models transformed text and images. Structured data - the largest and most consequential data format in the world - stayed untouched. Tables run every clinical trial, every financial model, every scientific experiment, every business decision, and no one had built a foundation model that truly understood them.

Until now. What LLMs did for language, we're doing for tables. The next modality shift in AI is happening, and we're hiring the team that makes it.

Momentum. We pioneered tabular foundation models and are now the world-leading organization in structured-data ML. Our TabPFN v2 model was published as a Nature https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08328-6 cover story and set a new state of the art for tabular machine learning. Since release we've scaled model capabilities 20x+, passed 3.5M+ downloads and 7,500+ GitHub stars, and are seeing accelerating adoption across research and industry - from detecting lung disease with Oxford Cancer Analytics https://www.oxcan.org/news/prior-labs-and-oxford-cancer-analytics-partner-to-advance-liquid-biopsy-and-clinical-decision-making-in-lung-disease to preventing train failures with Hitachi https://siliconangle.com/2025/12/01/prior-labs-debuts-tabular-ai-foundation-model-scales-10-million-rows/ to improving clinical-trial decisions with BostonGene https://priorlabs.ai/case-studies/boston-gene.

The hardest work is ahead. We're scaling tabular foundation models to millions of rows, thousands of features, real-time inference, and entirely new data modalities, while building the infrastructure to run them in production across some of the most demanding industries on earth. These are open problems no one else is working on at this level.

Our team. We're a small, highly selective team https://priorlabs.ai/about of 30+ engineers, researchers, and GTM specialists, with backgrounds spanning Google, Apple, Amazon, DeepMind, Meta, Microsoft Research, G-Research, Jane Street, Goldman Sachs, and CERN. We're led by Frank Hutter https://www.linkedin.com/in/frank-hutter-9190b24b/, Noah Hollmann https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-hollmann-668b9010b/, and Sauraj Gambhir https://www.linkedin.com/in/sauraj-g/, and advised by world-leading AI researchers including Bernhard Schölkopf and Turing Award winner Yann LeCun. We ship fast, do top-tier research, and hold each other to an extremely high bar.

What's next. In 2025 we raised €9m pre-seed led by Balderton Capital, backed by leaders from Hugging Face, DeepMind, and Black Forest Labs. The next phase of growth is here, which makes this an ideal time to join.

YOUR MISSION

Reporting to the COO, you'll own legal across the company: commercial contracts, IP, data privacy, post-acquisition governance, and everything in between. This is a hands-on senior IC role. You'll be the person who does the work, builds the systems, and becomes the one place the team turns to on any legal question. You'll handle what you can and manage specialist external counsel for everything else.

YOUR RESPONSIBILITIES

• Be the team's single point of contact for all legal requests. Triage what can be handled in-house, manage external counsel for everything else, and build the systems that keep legal from becoming a bottleneck.
• Own the legal workstream arising from the SAP acquisition: corporate structure, IP ownership, governance documentation, and the ongoing legal relationship with the parent company.
• Take ownership of commercial contracting end-to-end: negotiate and redline MSAs, NDAs, DPAs, and vendor agreements, and build a standard template library so routine deals don't require counsel at all.
• Build the legal function from the ground up: a contract management system, policy library, and internal escalation playbook that gives the team clear guardrails and scales beyond you.
• Define and protect Prior Labs' IP and open-source legal posture, including the boundary between TabPFN's open-source release and commercial product: licensing strategy, patents, trademarks, and contributor agreements.
• Bringing in and manage specialist external counsel where the depth or jurisdiction requires it.

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR

Must have

• 3+ years as in-house counsel at a tech or AI company
• Has personally owned a major corporate transaction or M&A process from the legal side
• Has negotiated commercial agreements (MSAs, DPAs, NDAs) directly with counterparties, without outside counsel carrying the work
• Track record managing external counsel: selecting firms, scoping mandates, controlling spend
• Has built or significantly shaped a legal function at an early-stage company (first or second in-house hire)
• Comfortable operating across both EU/German and US legal frameworks

Nice to have

• Open-source licensing or software IP experience
• Experience with cap table management

Life at Prior Labs

We're a small, ambitious team solving one of the hardest problems in AI, and we're just getting started. You'll work closely with world-class researchers and builders who care deeply about the quality of their craft, the impact of their work, and the people they work with.

We move fast, we think rigorously, and we take the time to do things right. If you're excited by hard problems, motivated by real-world impact, and want to be part of building something that matters, we'd love to hear from you.

We're building our teams in Berlin, Freiburg, and New York and we believe that when you're working on something as hard and exciting as TabPFN, being in the same room matters. Most of our roles are based in one of our offices but great people come from everywhere, and in exceptional cases we're open to remote. This usually involves frequent travel to one of our offices and the whole company comes together regularly for offsites to think, build, and celebrate together.

Our Commitments

We believe the best products and teams come from a wide range of perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds. That's why we welcome applications from people of all identities and walks of life, especially anyone who's ever felt discouraged by "not checking every box."

We're committed to creating a safe, inclusive environment and providing equal opportunities regardless of gender, sexual orientation, origin, disability, or any other trait that makes you who you are.