Prior Labs · Berlin
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. T...
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 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 to preventing train failures with Hitachi to
improving clinical-trial decisions with BostonGene.
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 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, Noah Hollmann, and Sauraj Gambhir, 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.
We care about how your data is handled. Read our Recruiting Privacy Notice to see exactly what we collect, why, and how long we
keep it.