{"id":715539,"url":"https://alion.io/job/priorlabs-research-engineer-foundation-model","title":"Research Engineer, Foundation Model","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":85,"open_postings":18,"ghost_share":0.167,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":65,"computed_at":"2026-11-04T06:34:25Z"}},"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":"Anomaly Detection","optional":false},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":false},{"name":"NumPy","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":false},{"name":"Scikit-learn","optional":false},{"name":"Time Series","optional":false},{"name":"Edge AI","optional":true},{"name":"GitHub","optional":true},{"name":"Model Distillation","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2025-09-11T16:41:54Z","employer_posted_date":"2025-09-11","last_verified_at":"2026-11-04T08:22:40Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":418,"trust":{"level":"ghost","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale","company_stale"],"days_open":418},"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\nTabular data breaks the assumptions that make scaling work for language and vision. There's no natural sequence, no spatial structure, no shared vocabulary across datasets. The architectures and scaling laws that power LLMs don't transfer. We've made the first breakthrough with TabPFN - the hardest problems are still ahead.\nAt Prior Labs, Research Engineers are the science team. You'll design experiments, contribute to papers, and write the code that turns architectural ideas into trained models - the same people do the research and the engineering, which is why both are good. You'll have significant technical ownership and room to grow as we scale.\nThe problems we're solving:\nScaling transformer architectures from 10K to 1M+ samples - without the structural assumptions that make language models scale\n\nBuilding multimodal models that combine tabular, text, and numerical understanding\n\nMaking models efficient enough for real-world deployment, not just accurate enough for a paper\n\nDesigning architectures for time series, forecasting, anomaly detection, and multiple related tables\n\nDay-to-day, you'll design and test novel architectures, run ablations, analyze scaling behavior, and write the training and evaluation infrastructure that makes rapid experimentation possible. We hold software quality to the same standard as research quality.\nWhat we're looking for\nMaster's or PhD in Computer Science or a related field, plus 3+ years of experience building ML systems in research or industry\n\nPublications at top ML venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, etc.) or equivalent demonstrated research impact (widely used open-source, deployed systems)\n\nDeep proficiency in Python, PyTorch, and the broader ML and data science ecosystem (scikit-learn, pandas, NumPy), with strong software engineering practices\n\nExperience implementing and training neural network architectures, ideally transformers or foundation models\n\nSolid understanding of training dynamics, scaling behavior, and common failure modes in deep learning systems\n\nGenuine interest in model efficiency - making large models faster, more scalable, and practical to deploy\n\nNice to have\nExperience at an early-stage startup or as a founding engineer\n\nContributions to open-source ML libraries or tools\n\nExperience with model distillation, inference optimization, or on-device ML\n\nBackground in tabular data, time series, or other structured data - helpful but not required\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":4636,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":3,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"master","optional":false},"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":8,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.297,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":418,"expected_fill_days":65,"reasons":["conf:2","ghost","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-11-04T06:34:25Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/priorlabs-research-engineer-foundation-model","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/priorlabs-research-engineer-foundation-model.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-04T09:56:38Z","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":15430,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-05T00:00:00Z"}},"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-research-engineer-foundation-model"},{"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-research-engineer-foundation-model"},{"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-research-engineer-foundation-model"},{"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-research-engineer-foundation-model\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fpriorlabs-research-engineer-foundation-model"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":715539}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"priorlabs.ai","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":715539},"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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