Software Engineer, Cloud

Join Prior Labs!

Who We Are: Prior Labs is building breakthrough foundation models that understand spreadsheets and databases—the backbone of science and business. Foundation models have transformed text and images, but structured data has remained largely untouched. We’re tackling this $100B+ opportunity to revolutionize how we approach scientific discovery, medical research, financial modeling, and business intelligence.

Our Impact: We aim to be the world-leading organization working on structured data. Our TabPFN v2 model, recently published in Nature, sets the new state-of-the-art for small structured data. Our models have gained significant traction with 1M+ downloads and 3,500+ GitHub stars. We are now building the next generation of models that combine AI advancements with specialized architectures for structured data.

Backing and Momentum: With €9M in pre-seed funding from top-tier investors including Balderton Capital, XTX Ventures, and Hector Foundation—and support from leaders at Hugging Face, DeepMind, and Silo AI—we’re moving rapidly toward commercialization.

Read more about our vision on our blog.

About the role

You will have ownership over designing, building, and scaling the core infrastructure that brings 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.

You'll work directly with world-class AI researchers, translating cutting-edge models into reliable, scalable production systems. This role offers significant autonomy and impact, with clear paths to specialize in areas you're passionate about (like ML infrastructure or 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 Do:

• Architect & Design: Lead the design of robust, scalable, and secure backend systems and production-grade APIs for serving and finetuning our foundation models.

• Build & Implement: Develop high-quality, maintainable code (Python/FastAPI experience highly valued) for core backend services.

• Own Infrastructure: Design, deploy, and manage core infrastructure on cloud platforms (AWS/GCP preferred), focusing on reliability, monitoring, observability, and cost-efficiency (IaC principles).

• Ensure Compliance & Security: Implement secure, GDPR-compliant systems, including data storage, access control, usage tracking, and quota management.

• Collaborate: Work closely with AI researchers to understand model requirements and build efficient serving/training infrastructure (MLOps).

• Champion Best Practices: Drive high standards for testing, CI/CD, documentation, and security within the engineering team.

Qualifications:

• 5+ years of professional experience in a cloud engineering, data platform, or SRE role, with a proven track record of managing production infrastructure.

• Proven experience building and maintaining data-intensive systems, with a strong understanding of data modeling, storage, and processing technologies.

• Strong, hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using tools like Terraform or Pulumi.

• Significant experience with containerization and orchestration technologies (Docker, Kubernetes).

• Proficiency in a scripting language, ideally Python, for infrastructure and data pipeline automation.

What Sets You Apart:

• Experience building or managing infrastructure specifically for machine learning (MLOps, model serving frameworks, feature stores, data pipelines).

• Hands-on experience with modern data warehousing and processing platforms like Databricks, Snowflake, or BigQuery.

• Experience in a technical leadership or mentorship role.

• Contributions to relevant open-source projects.

• Expertise in security best practices and data privacy regulations (especially GDPR).

• Interest in foundation models, AI, and tackling fundamental technical challenges.

Location

• Offices in Freiburg, Germany - a university city at the edge of the Black Forest, Switzerland and France, and Berlin—a global tech hub and one of Europe’s most dynamic cities

Benefits

• Competitive compensation package with meaningful equity

• 30 days of paid vacation + public holidays

• Comprehensive benefits including healthcare, transportation, and fitness

• Work with state-of-the-art ML architecture, substantial compute resources and with a world-class team