---
title: 'Founder Associate (NYC) at Prior Labs'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/founder-associate-nyc-prior-labs-new-york-pgwmkf4z47nw'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-11'
---

# Founder Associate (NYC) at Prior Labs

- **Company:** Prior Labs
- **Location:** New York, NY
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-08-26
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-11
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/prior-labs/1e0d43ae-26b1-4b59-a28f-cb1f35a8b576

## Job description

## Who we are

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](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08328-6) cover story, has passed 3.5M+ downloads and 7,500+ GitHub stars, and runs in production 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/). 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+](https://priorlabs.ai/about) with backgrounds from Google, DeepMind, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Jane Street, and CERN, 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 Bernhard Schölkopf and Turing Award winner Yann LeCun. In July 2026, less than 18 months after our €9M pre-seed, we [joined SAP](https://priorlabs.ai/blog-posts/priorlabs-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 Role

As our Founder Associate, you sit in the founders' office and work directly with the founders and Chief of Staff to shape and execute the initiatives that drive Prior Labs' growth. You get real ownership of business functions, with broad exposure across the company, from strategy to execution. We run our business functions with defined areas of ownership: Growth, Sales & Enablement, Marketing & Community, and People Ops. You pick up ownership across these areas based on what the company needs and where you're strongest, and you go deep where you have the most impact. Everything we do is AI-first, so you'll spend less time on the grunt work and more time building the systems that make it obsolete.

Core Areas of Impact Below are examples of what you could own: Growth Leads that reach Prior Labs get qualified, enriched, scored, and routed automatically. You own that engine, make it better, and find the next channel.

- Own the inbound pipeline end to end
- Remove the manual steps that are left: better scoring, smarter routing, more automation
- Build the pipeline reporting the founders and sales team actually use
- Test new channels: data sources, outbound angles, our first paid experiments
- Own tracking and attribution, so we know where pipeline actually comes from

Sales Enablement Our sales team talks to some of the largest companies in the world. You build everything around their conversations so they can focus on selling.

- Automate call prep: short briefings so no one walks into a call cold
- Own decks, case studies, battle cards, and demo assets
- Keep POCs on track: milestones, follow-ups, next steps
- Turn closed deals into reference stories and case studies

Ops & Automation We think most internal work can be automated with today's AI, and your job is to do it.

- Pick the most annoying recurring workflow each month and automate it
- Build agents and automations across our stack: HRIS, CRM, Notion, Slack
- Own the internal tooling landscape: what we use, how it connects
- Prototype fast: a working script this week over a perfect system next quarter
- Ship things the whole company uses daily

Expansion & People Ops We're doubling headcount across 2 countries, and everything behind that is being built right now. If you're obsessed with people, culture, and process building, this is your playground.

- Help open our new offices and set up new countries
- Own onboarding end to end, from signed contract to a solid first week
- Take clunky people processes, redesign it, ship it
- Make our HRIS the single source of truth, with automations doing the boring parts
- Run the operational side of hiring: scheduling, candidate communication, interview logistics

## What We're Looking For

You're a resourceful, adaptable, and self-driven builder who thrives in a fast-paced startup environment. We're looking for someone with the potential to grow into a future leader of the company. You have: Essential Background

- A Bachelor's or Master's degree in Business Administration, Computer Science, Data Science, or a related field, or you've done the work without the credential
- 1-2 years of experience in consulting, venture capital, start-ups or similar roles
- An AI-first way of working: you try new tools the moment they come out, you know where they save time, and you know where your own judgment still has to take over
- High agency: you ship a v1 quickly, iterate, and don't wait for a brief to figure out what needs doing
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with a focus on execution
- Structured and reliable: when you own something, it's handled
- Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, in English

What Makes You Special

- Experience working in or with early-stage startups
- You've built automations, agents, or internal tools that people actually used
- Background in machine learning, data science, or related technical fields
- Familiarity with open source, foundation models, or data science ecosystems
- Proven ability to manage cross-functional projects or initiatives
- Interest or experience in sales enablement, content creation, or community building

Location

- New York
- On-site

## Benefits - US

- Competitive compensation package
- 20 days paid vacation
- Health, dental and vision 100% employer-paid
- Fitness and transportation allowances
- 401k matching (2%, one-year cliff)
- Team offsites at least once a year

Life at Prior Labs 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 Commitments The 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](https://priorlabs.ai/recruiting-data-privacy) page

## About Prior Labs

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Prior Labs builds state-of-the-art tabular foundation models (starting with TabPFN) that natively understand structured data, enabling zero-shot and fine-tuned predictions for spreadsheets, databases, and enterprise data workflows.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Pre-Seed/Seed stage; $9.4M total funding)
- **Headquarters**: Freiburg, Germany (with offices in Berlin, New York, and San Francisco)
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Frank Hutter, Noah Hollmann, Alexander Rudolf Diehl, Sauraj Gambhir

## Core Business
- **Primary Industry**: Artificial Intelligence / Foundation Models for Tabular Data
- **Target Customers**: B2B – Data science teams, enterprise data analysts, quantitative researchers, and agent developers in finance, healthcare, energy, and business analytics.
- **Mission / Purpose**: "Help humanity make better decisions" by creating the world’s most capable tabular AI — a foundation for discovery across science, medicine, and the global economy.

## Products & Services
- **TabPFN-3 (API)**: Their frontier model for structured data prediction. Handles up to 1M rows in 0.2 seconds. Features a "Thinking mode" that achieves +420 ELO and beats AutoML in 80% of cases on the TabArena benchmark.
- **TabPFN-3 (VPC / Private Cloud)**: Deploy the same frontier model inside a customer's own cloud environment for sensitive data (healthcare, finance, defense).
- **Agent SDK / Integration**: Embed tabular intelligence into AI agents, enabling structured data reasoning for agentic workflows.
- **Synthetic Data Generation**: Generate high-quality synthetic tabular data for privacy-preserving analytics, model training, or data augmentation.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation / Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed (private company).
- **Key Financials**: $9.4M in total funding (Seed round closed Feb 2025; corporate/pre-seed rounds prior)
- **Notable Investors / Partners**: Balderton Capital, XTX Ventures, SAP Founder Hans-Werner Hector’s Hector Foundation, Atlantic Labs, Galion.exe. Angels include Thomas Wolf (Hugging Face Co-Founder), Peter Sarlin (Silo AI), Guy Podjarny (Snyk/Tessl), Ed Grefenstette (DeepMind), Robin Rombach (Black Forest Labs), and Christopher Lynch (AtScale).
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount grew 320% YoY to ~39 employees (from 7 in 2024). Recent acquisition by SAP (signed definitive agreement in 2025). Active job postings: 22. Operates in 10 countries.

## Competitive Advantages
- **First-mover in "Tabular Foundation Models"**: While LLMs and vision models are saturated, Prior Labs is pioneering large-scale pre-trained transformers for spreadsheets and databases.
- **Breathtaking Performance**: 93% win rate over classic ML on TabArena; beats AutoML in 80% of cases; 0.2s inference on 1M rows — orders of magnitude faster than traditional AutoML pipelines.
- **Scientific Lineage**: Founders and team come from top ML institutions (University of Freiburg, Max Planck Institute, Meta FAIR). Scientific advisory board includes Yann LeCun and Bernhard Schölkopf.
- **Acquisition by SAP**: Signed definitive agreement — provides immediate enterprise credibility, distribution, and resources for scaling.

## Strategic Focus
- **Scale the model**: Continue improving TabPFN-3 with "Thinking mode" and larger context windows for complex reasoning.
- **Enterprise adoption**: Expand into healthcare cancer risk prediction, financial trading, and energy forecasting via VPC deployments.
- **Agent ecosystem**: Make TabPFN the default AI for structured data in agentic workflows (LangChain, AutoGPT, etc.).
- **Post-acquisition integration**: Embed the technology into SAP’s business suite to power predictive analytics for millions of enterprises.

## Why Work Here
- **Cutting-edge AI work**: Work with state-of-the-art foundation model architecture, substantial compute resources, and a world-class team (Google DeepMind, Meta, Hugging Face alumni).
- **Meaningful impact**: Solve real problems in science, medicine, and finance — not just another chatbot.
- **Generous benefits**: 30 days paid vacation + public holidays (paid out if not taken), competitive salary + meaningful equity, seamless relocation support (including relocation bonus), healthcare, transportation, fitness, team lunches & company offsites.
- **Office-first culture, multiple hubs**: In-office policy in Freiburg (academic excellence + nature), Berlin (tech/culture), New York (energy/talent), and San Francisco (innovation epicenter). Strong preference for in-person collaboration with top-tier peers.
- **Team values**: High integrity, high-performance empathetic culture, undogmatic ("valuing output over principles"), and mission-driven.
- **Growth stage**: High growth (320% YoY) + post-acquisition by SAP means accelerated impact, resources, and career development.

## Sources
1. [priorlabs.ai](https://priorlabs.ai/)
2. [priorlabs.ai/careers](https://priorlabs.ai/careers)
3. [priorlabs.ai/about](https://priorlabs.ai/about)
4. [LinkedIn (Prior Labs)](https://www.linkedin.com/company/prior-labs)
5. [Built In (Prior Labs)](https://builtin.com/company/prior-labs)

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