Director of Engineering

Who We Are

Prior Labs is revolutionizing structured data analysis by developing tabular foundation models, similar to breakthroughs in text and image AI. Our notable project, TabPFN v2, featured in Nature and highly acclaimed with millions of downloads, is applied in diverse fields like medical diagnostics and industrial safety. Our specialized team of over 40 experts includes veterans from top tech and research institutions, supported by leading AI pioneers. Since July 2026, we operate as an independent AI lab within SAP with substantial financial backing.

Role Overview

We seek our inaugural engineering director to lead and expand our engineering division. Reporting directly to the CTO and founders, this position requires a hands-on manager focused on optimizing team performance, establishing hiring processes, enforcing standards, ensuring compliance, and coordinating with SAP.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and expand the engineering team, including developing its management hierarchy.
• Develop and manage hiring operations, designing reliable interview procedures suited for AI era while maintaining top talent standards.
• Define and uphold engineering practices for code review, testing, deployment, leveraging AI tools for enhanced productivity.
• Manage security and compliance programs such as SOC 2, GDPR, and ISO 27001 ensuring agility is preserved.
• Serve as the engineering liaison in collaborations with SAP.
• Oversee the deployment platform as a customer-facing product, emphasizing user-centric design in APIs, VPCs, and self-hosted models.
• Collaborate closely with founders to shape organizational and technical strategies, fostering constructive dialogue.

Candidate Profile

• Proven leadership experience managing engineering teams of 10+ direct and/or through managerial layers, with clear evidence of organizational growth.
• Ownership of scalable platform or infrastructure responsibilities including serving APIs, availability, cloud cost management.
• Familiarity with operating under security and compliance audit standards like SOC 2 and ISO; hands-on experience is advantageous.
• Background bridging startup agility and large enterprise structure, comfortable initiating frameworks and engaging with major corporate partners.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience scaling engineering organizations significantly (e.g., 25 to 60+ members), including developing middle management.
• Led engineering teams through acquisition processes involving parent company cooperation.
• Work experience in research or machine learning environments understanding distinctions and integration challenges between research and production codebases.
• Demonstrated impact from adoption of AI coding tools on team workflows and outcomes.

Life at Prior Labs

You will collaborate with highly skilled researchers and engineers dedicated to excellence and efficiency. While our offices are located in Berlin, Freiburg, and New York, we accommodate exceptional remote candidates who can travel frequently and participate in regular company offsites.

Inclusion Commitment

We embrace diversity and encourage applicants from all backgrounds to apply, valuing authentic experiences over perfect credential matches. Equal opportunity is fundamental in our hiring.