--- title: 'Head of Operations at Prior Labs' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-operations-prior-labs-berlin-yr64g7za4a3a' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-11' --- # Head of Operations at Prior Labs - **Company:** Prior Labs - **Location:** Berlin, Germany - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** onsite - **Posted:** 2026-07-29 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-11 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/prior-labs/e4153b6c-5d0c-4d04-a0ff-dc68ccaf0515 ## 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. ## The Role The Head of Operations reports to Sauraj (Co-CEO, GTM and Operations) and take ownership of operational excellence company-wide. As Finance, Legal, People, IT and InfoSec, and Compliance grow into their own functions, this person partners with each lead on the operational side of their work and holds the whole together as one system. They lead the operations team and grow it into one fit for a company many times our current size. - Builds the operating engine for growth and scale. Owns how the company runs operationally and designs the processes that hold up as headcount, revenue, and complexity grow fast. Everything breaks at each new stage of growth; this person sees it coming and rebuilds ahead of the curve so operations never becomes the ceiling on how fast we can move. - Drives operational excellence across every function. Accountable for the operational side of finance, people, legal, and the wider back office, with IT, InfoSec, and compliance covered through the relevant leads. You will set the standard and makes sure nothing important falls between functions. - Brings order to ambiguity. Takes the most complex, cross-functional problems and drives them to resolution bringing all the right stakeholder to the table, motivating and inspiring them to come together and deliver the project for everyone’s benefit. - Is a decision partner. Frames trade-offs, surfaces risk early, and turns decisions into action, so the leadership team works from reliable data and sound judgment. - Builds and inspires the operations team. Hires, develops, and leads an operations team people want to be part of, and sets a standard of execution that raises the bar for everyone who works with them. Who we're looking for Essential: - High-growth experience above all. Has operated inside a company through rapid scaling, seen what breaks at each stage, and built the processes and structures that scaled through it. This is the most important thing we are looking for. - Global operating experience. Has run operations across multiple countries and regions, comfortable holding a company together across time zones and jurisdictions, not just in a single market. - Broad operations ownership. Has driven operational excellence across two or more of finance, people, legal, and business operations as a senior generalist, partnering with specialist leads rather than owning their decisions. - A leader operators want to follow. Builds and develops strong teams and is the kind of person other excellent operators want to come and work with. A big plus: - Experience in the data, developer tools, or AI market, and comfort working credibly with a technical, research-led team - Has built an operations function that grew with a company from startup into real scale What makes someone thrive here: - Energized by building the systems that unlock the next stage of growth, not by maintaining the status quo - Radical ownership: runs at the most difficult problems and resolves them rather than passing them up - Practical and pragmatic: builds processes that scale without bloat, using as much structure as the moment needs - Calm and decisive under ambiguity and competing priorities, and sets that standard for the team Location Ideally this person will be located at one of our hubs in New York or Berlin. In exceptional circumstances, we will be able to consider remote/hybrid applications. 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. 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