{"id":715537,"url":"https://alion.io/job/priorlabs-ml-engineer-backend","title":"ML Engineer, Backend","company":{"id":686123,"name":"Prior Labs","domain":"priorlabs.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/priorlabs","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":88,"open_postings":19,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.474,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-11-01T06:10:25Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"middle","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Berlin, Germany","Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany","New York, United States"],"countries":["DE","US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":3,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Docker","optional":false},{"name":"FastAPI","optional":false},{"name":"Feature Store","optional":false},{"name":"GCP","optional":false},{"name":"GDPR","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":false},{"name":"Quantization","optional":false},{"name":"Terraform","optional":false},{"name":"GitHub","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2025-09-26T13:25:12Z","employer_posted_date":"2025-09-26","last_verified_at":"2026-11-01T21:13:25Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":401,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":400},"description":"Who we are\nFoundation 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.\nWe pioneered tabular foundation models: TabPFN v2 was a Nature cover story, has passed 3.5M+ downloads and 7,500+ GitHub stars, and runs in production from detecting lung disease with Oxford Cancer Analytics to preventing train failures with Hitachi. 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.\nWe're a small, highly selective team of 40+ with backgrounds from Google, DeepMind, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Jane Street, and CERN, led by Frank Hutter, Noah Hollmann, and Sauraj Gambhir, and advised by Bernhard Schölkopf and Turing Award winner Yann LeCun.\nIn July 2026, less than 18 months after our €9M pre-seed, we joined SAP as an independent frontier AI lab - same team, mission, and open-weights models, now backed by more than €1 billion over four years.\nAbout the role\nYou 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.\nTabPFN 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.\nYou'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.\nWhat you'll work on:\nOwn 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.\n\nArchitect & Design: Design robust, scalable, and secure backend systems and production-grade APIs for serving our foundation models.\n\nBuild & Implement: Develop high-quality, maintainable code for core backend services.\n\nOwn Infrastructure: Design, deploy, and manage core infrastructure on cloud platforms, focusing on reliability, monitoring, observability, and cost-efficiency.\n\nEnsure Compliance & Security: Implement secure, GDPR-compliant systems, including data storage, access control, usage tracking, and quota management.\n\nChampion Best Practices: Drive high standards for testing, CI/CD, documentation, and security within the engineering team.\n\nYou may be a good fit if you have:\n3+ years of professional experience in machine learning and backend engineering, with a proven track record of managing production infrastructure.\n\nProven experience deploying and operating machine learning models in production, with a strong understanding of how models behave and fail under real traffic.\n\nStrong, hands-on experience designing and building production-grade APIs and backend services.\n\nSignificant experience building and operating services on cloud platforms, with GCP preferred.\n\nStrong, hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using tools like Terraform.\n\nSignificant experience with containerization and orchestration technologies (Docker, Kubernetes).\n\nProficiency in Python.\n\nWhat sets you apart\nExperience building or managing infrastructure specifically for machine learning (MLOps, model serving frameworks, feature stores, data pipelines).\n\nDeep experience with inference optimization (quantization, compilation, dynamic batching, caching strategies, interplay with distributed computing).\n\nExperience with PyTorch and FastAPI specifically.\n\nContributions to relevant open-source projects.\n\nLife at Prior Labs\nYou'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.\nOur 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.\nOur Commitments\nThe 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.\nWe care about how your data is handled - see our Recruiting Data Privacy page","description_format":"text","description_chars":5288,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":3,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Artificial Intelligence","LLM & Generative AI","Foundation Models"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-11T05:56:37Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":6,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.212,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":400,"expected_fill_days":30,"reasons":["conf:1","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-11-01T06:10:25Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/priorlabs-ml-engineer-backend","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/priorlabs-ml-engineer-backend.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-01T23:38:43Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":36022,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-02T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":686123},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=686123"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fpriorlabs-ml-engineer-backend"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fpriorlabs-ml-engineer-backend"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fpriorlabs-ml-engineer-backend"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/priorlabs-ml-engineer-backend\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fpriorlabs-ml-engineer-backend"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":715537}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"priorlabs.ai","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":715537},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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