Research Scientist, Foundational Data Science

Prior Labs; Berlin; Vor Ort; EUR 70.000 - 110.000; Vollzeit

Zusammenfassung

Prior Labs is hiring to expand our ambitious team focused on advancing tabular foundation models. In this role, you will invent and build tools that enhance the capabilities of TabPFN while solving real-world data challenges.

The ideal candidate thrives in a dynamic environment and is equipped to address complex data science problems. To excel, you should possess a strong background across various data science disciplines.

Join us in Berlin and become part of a dedicated team transforming the landscape of machine learning.

Qualifikationen

• Proven ability in solving real-world data problems across diverse domains.
• Familiarity with optimization techniques beyond single best scores.
• Experience with data defects and their impacts on training signals.

Aufgaben

• Invent and build tools that enhance TabPFN's capabilities.
• Set research directions by prioritizing model capabilities.
• Translate external research needs into actionable tasks.

Kenntnisse

Data science problem solving

Strong performance optimization

Gradient-boosted trees expertise

Understanding dataset defects

Senior individual contributor

Jobbeschreibung

Who we are

Foundation models transformed text and images. Structured data - the largest and most consequential data format in the world - stayed untouched. Tables run every clinical trial, every financial model, every scientific experiment, every business decision, and no one had built a foundation model that truly understood them.

Until now. What LLMs did for language, we're doing for tables. The next modality shift in AI is happening, and we're hiring the team that makes it.

Momentum. We pioneered tabular foundation models and are now the world-leading organization in structured-data ML. Our TabPFN v2 model was published as a Nature cover story and set a new state of the art for tabular machine learning. Since release we've scaled model capabilities 20x+, passed 3.5M+ downloads and 7,500+ GitHub stars, and are seeing accelerating adoption across research and industry - from detecting lung disease with Oxford Cancer Analytics to preventing train failures with Hitachi to improving clinical-trial decisions with BostonGene.

The hardest work is ahead. We're scaling tabular foundation models to millions of rows, thousands of features, real-time inference, and entirely new data modalities, while building the infrastructure to run them in production across some of the most demanding industries on earth. These are open problems no one else is working on at this level.

Our team. We're a small, highly selective team of 30+ engineers, researchers, and GTM specialists, with backgrounds spanning Google, Apple, Amazon, DeepMind, Meta, Microsoft Research, G-Research, Jane Street, Goldman Sachs, and CERN. We're led by Frank Hutter, Noah Hollmann and Sauraj Gambhir, and advised by world-leading AI researchers including Bernhard Schölkopf and Turing Award winner Yann LeCun. We ship fast, do top-tier research, and hold each other to an extremely high bar.

What's next. In 2025 we raised €9m pre-seed led by Balderton Capital, backed by leaders from Hugging Face, DeepMind, and Black Forest Labs. The next phase of growth is here, which makes this an ideal time to join.

What you'll do

• Invent and build the frontier tools that extend TabPFN, including its thinking, scaling, and agentic capabilities, and the new methods that let one model generalize across the full landscape of data-science problems. This is the most open-ended part of the work and grows over time.
• Set the research direction by deciding which model capabilities and benchmarks are worth pursuing, choosing what is worth solving rather than optimizing a score someone else set.
• Bring in external research and real customer needs to shape new model and tooling directions, and publish frontier results that move the field forward.
• Build trustworthy benchmarks from the structured data behind real, high-impact problems, so the team optimizes for real-world performance rather than one leaderboard.
• Faithfully implement the baselines and competitor models that set the gold standard of applied data science, giving the team a read on where TabPFN leads and where there is room to improve.
• Build an automated, agentic pipeline with a human in the loop so this data and benchmark foundation scales to far larger volumes without losing rigor, itself a genuinely new tool.

What we're looking for

• You have solved data-science problems across many domains and datasets to a high standard, optimizing for strong performance across a whole suite of tasks rather than the single best score on one.
• You work undogmatically across the ML toolbox, including getting strong results with gradient-boosted trees (such as XGBoost) and not only with deep learning.
• You understand the common categories of dataset defects (leakage, label noise, distribution shift, duplication, mislabeled targets, and similar) and why each corrupts a training or benchmark signal.
• You are energized by foundational work, valuing the dataset and benchmark bedrock as much as the frontier tooling, and you have taken on hard problems others passed over.
• You thrive as a senior individual contributor in an ambiguous, early-stage, low-process environment. You are opinionated on best practice in Data Science and can make good judgement calls on approaches to complex problems.

Nice to have

• Experience building or extending evaluation harnesses, benchmark suites, or experiment frameworks that others rely on.
• Experience building LLM- or agent-assisted pipelines with a human in the loop to scale a previously manual workflow.
• Experience acting as the link between external research or customer needs and an internal model or product roadmap.
• Prior work on tabular, structured-data, or foundation-model problems, or helping shape an emerging research subfield through community work.

Life at Prior Labs

We're a small, ambitious team solving one of the hardest problems in AI. You'll work closely with world‑class researchers and builders who care deeply about the quality of work, impact, and people. We build teams in Berlin, Freiburg, and New York. Most roles are based in one office but we support remote for exceptional cases with frequent travel.

Our Commitments

We believe the best products and teams come from a wide range of perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds. That's why we welcome applications from people of all identities and walks of life, especially anyone who's ever felt discouraged by 'not checking every box.'

We're committed to creating a safe, inclusive environment and providing equal opportunities regardless of gender, sexual orientation, origin, disability, or any other trait that makes you who you are.

We care about how your data is handled. Read our Recruiting Privacy Notice to see exactly what we collect, why, and how long we keep it.