---
title: 'ML Engineer, Backend at Prior Labs'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/ml-engineer-backend-prior-labs-berlin-k0zd8fzc9g39'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-16'
---

# ML Engineer, Backend at Prior Labs

- **Company:** Prior Labs
- **Location:** Berlin, Germany
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2025-09-26
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-16
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/prior-labs/93ef6100-091d-46f5-8f73-3843fe993ede/application

**Skills:** Python, FastAPI, Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, Cloud Engineering, Infrastructure as Code, Data Modeling, Machine Learning Lifecycle, CI/CD, Databricks, Snowflake, BigQuery, MLOps, Model Serving Frameworks, Feature Stores, Data Pipelines, Open Source Contributions

> Design, build, and scale core infrastructure for serving foundation models, including backend systems, APIs, and cloud-managed infrastructure. The role involves implementing MLOps concepts, ensuring GDPR compliance, and driving engineering best practices in a high-impact, fast-paced environment.

## 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

You will have ownership over designing, building, and scaling the core systems that bring 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. TabPFN does its learning in the forward pass, and it now handles datasets in the millions of rows. Making that fast, reliable, and affordable is an exciting engineering challenge. You'll work directly with world-class AI researchers, translating cutting-edge models into scalable production systems. This role offers significant autonomy and impact, with clear paths to specialize in areas you're passionate about (like inference optimization and 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 work on:

- Own Inference: Own the serving path end-to-end: latency, throughput, batching, memory behavior on large inputs, and cost per prediction. Our models serve through our managed API, inside customer VPCs, and as self-hosted open weights, and you’ll have an impact across the board.
- Architect & Design: Design robust, scalable, and secure backend systems and production-grade APIs for serving our foundation models.
- Build & Implement: Develop high-quality, maintainable code for core backend services.
- Own Infrastructure: Design, deploy, and manage core infrastructure on cloud platforms, focusing on reliability, monitoring, observability, and cost-efficiency.
- 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.

You may be a good fit if you have:

- 3+ years of professional experience in machine learning and backend engineering, with a proven track record of managing production infrastructure.
- Proven experience deploying and operating machine learning models in production, with a strong understanding of how models behave and fail under real traffic.
- Strong, hands-on experience designing and building production-grade APIs and backend services.
- Significant experience building and operating services on cloud platforms, with GCP preferred.
- 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.

What sets you apart

- Experience building or managing infrastructure specifically for machine learning (MLOps, model serving frameworks, feature stores, data pipelines).
- Deep experience with inference optimization (quantization, compilation, dynamic batching, caching strategies, interplay with distributed computing).
- Experience with PyTorch and FastAPI specifically.
- Contributions to relevant open-source projects.

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)

## Other roles at Prior Labs

- [Head of Partnerships (SAP)](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-partnerships-sap-prior-labs-new-york-wv4ad00qtrxm) — New York, NY
- [Head of Operations](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-operations-prior-labs-berlin-5hdrregy1pg4) — Berlin, Germany
- [Technical Product Manager, Integrations](https://feeny.ai/job/technical-product-manager-integrations-prior-labs-berlin-9b8r2w1rk6vs) — Berlin, Germany
- [Director of Engineering](https://feeny.ai/job/director-of-engineering-prior-labs-berlin-kwhgq8ardmsh) — Berlin, Germany
- [Founder Associate (NYC)](https://feeny.ai/job/founder-associate-nyc-prior-labs-new-york-pgwmkf4z47nw) — New York, NY
- [Visiting Associate Cohort](https://feeny.ai/job/visiting-associate-cohort-prior-labs-berlin-74t53y2nb9zq) — Berlin, Germany
- [Founder Associate (Berlin)](https://feeny.ai/job/founder-associate-berlin-prior-labs-berlin-av0j7475f3mz) — Berlin, Germany
- [Partnerships Manager (SAP)](https://feeny.ai/job/partnerships-manager-sap-prior-labs-new-york-ps8a717nst6y) — New York, NY
- [Partnerships Manager (Non-SAP)](https://feeny.ai/job/partnerships-manager-non-sap-prior-labs-new-york-538y9t74bc87) — New York, NY
- [Technical Recruiter (Berlin)](https://feeny.ai/job/technical-recruiter-berlin-prior-labs-berlin-9d9ctmt8a209) — Berlin, Germany