New comment by noahho in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2026)"

Prior Labs | Berlin, Freiburg, NYC | ONSITE | Full-time | ML Infra, Research Scientist/Engineer, Backend, Full Stack

We build foundation models for tabular data. Deep learning transformed text and images but mostly skipped tables, which are still the data behind most clinical trials, financial models and scientific experiments. The reason is structural: no natural sequence, no spatial structure, no shared vocabulary across datasets, so the architectures and scaling laws behind LLMs don't transfer.

Our approach: pre-train a transformer on millions of synthetic datasets sampled from causal-structure priors. The whole dataset goes in as context, predictions come out in one forward pass. No per-dataset training, no hyperparameter tuning, seconds instead of hours. TabPFN v2 was published in Nature and set a new state of the art; TabPFN-3 scales to 10M rows. 4M+ downloads, 8k+ GitHub stars, in production from liquid biopsy to rail maintenance. Code: https://github.com/PriorLabs/TabPFN

Since July we're an independent lab inside SAP, with more than EUR 1B committed over four years. Models stay open, research stays public, same team and offices.

Roles (most can sit in any of the three offices):

- Senior ML Infrastructure Engineer: own multi-cluster GPU infra (Slurm on GCP today, multi-provider next), training performance and the tooling layer. We spend tens of millions per year on compute; you own that budget.

- Research Scientist, Foundation Model: drive the model agenda - novel architectures, scaling from 10K to 1M+ samples, multimodal and causal directions. PhD plus top-venue publications, or equivalent.

- Research Engineer, Foundation Model: same agenda from the engineering side. You design experiments, write the training and eval infra, and co-author the papers.

- ML Engineer, Cloud Platform: design and scale the backend that serves and finetunes the models. Python/FastAPI, Terraform, K8s.

- Full Stack Engineer, ML Platform: build the product end to end. TypeScript + Python, React/FastAPI/Postgres.

Also hiring: Applied Scientist, Forward Deployed ML Engineer, Research Scientist (Foundational Data Science), PhD research interns, plus GTM and ops roles.

~40 people with backgrounds from Google, DeepMind, Jane Street, Goldman, G-Research, CERN. Led by Frank Hutter, advised by Bernhard Schölkopf and Yann LeCun. Comp competitive with top AI labs.

All roles and applications: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/prior-labs

Questions welcome in the replies here.