Finance Lead (FP&A)

Job description

WHO WE ARE Foundation 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. We pioneered tabular foundation models: TabPFN v2 was a Nature https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08328-6 cover story, has passed 3.5M+ downloads and 7,500+ GitHub stars, and runs in production from detecting lung disease with Oxford Cancer Analytics https://www.oxcan.org/news/prior-labs-and-oxford-cancer-analytics-partner-to-advance-liquid-biopsy-and-clinical-decision-making-in-lung-disease to preventing train failures with Hitachi https://siliconangle.com/2025/12/01/prior-labs-debuts-tabular-ai-foundation-model-scales-10-million-rows/. 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. We're a small, highly selective team of 40+ https://priorlabs.ai/about with backgrounds from Google, DeepMind, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Jane Street, and CERN, led by Frank Hutter https://www.linkedin.com/in/frank-hutter-9190b24b/, Noah Hollmann https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-hollmann-668b9010b/, and Sauraj Gambhir https://www.linkedin.com/in/sauraj-g/, and advised by Bernhard Schölkopf and Turing Award winner Yann LeCun. In July 2026, less than 18 months after our €9M pre-seed, we joined SAP https://priorlabs.ai/blog-posts/priorlabs-sap as an independent frontier AI lab - same team, mission, and open-weights models, now backed by more than €1 billion over four years. Your Mission Own the numbers behind Prior Labs. As our first dedicated finance hire, you will work with the founders to establish process and become the person leadership trusts - Build and own our core company financial model: revenue, costs, cash, and P&L, with annual budgets, rolling forecasts, and scenario and sensitivity analysis leadership can act on. - Stand up our operational and SaaS metrics layer: ARR, usage, unit economics, gross margin, burn, runway, and retention, so we always know where the business stands. - Run spend, cash discipline, and light financial controlling: budget versus actuals, vendor and cost decisions, a live cash picture, simple controls and monitoring, and early flags when we drift off plan. - Turn financial data into decisions leadership trusts: regular reporting for Leadership and the SAP group with the drivers explained and a clear recommendation attached. - Be the reliable finance point of contact between a fast-moving startup and SAP's group planning cadence. - Set up finance foundations that scale: the right tooling, clean data feeds, automation of the repetitive work, and good judgment about where AI helps in finance and where it does not. What we're looking for - You have built and owned a core company financial model end to end for an AI lab, Deep Tech. - You have built a finance or FP&A function from near-zero inside a small, early-stage, ambiguous company. You are comfortable building an auditable model from a short brief. - You have owned annual budgets, rolling forecasts, and budget-versus-actuals across a company and reporting directly to Founders - You are fluent in driver-based FP&A and comfortable building an auditable model from a messy brief. - You understand the accounting close well enough to oversee it, and you know when speed beats rigour on a small team. - You have good judgment about using AI and automation in finance: where they save real time, and where a human check has to stay. - Experience coordinating an external accounting partner and running light financial controls and monitoring. Nice to have - A track record of board, investor, or exec reporting - Experience building and tracking SaaS or consumption metrics from raw data. - Experience standing up finance tooling, automation, and processes from scratch. We are scoping this role around ownership rather than years on a CV. A strong mid-level operator ready to step up is as welcome as a seasoned senior manager. LIFE AT PRIOR LABS You'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. Our 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. OUR COMMITMENTS The 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. We care about how your data is handled - see our Recruiting Data Privacy https://priorlabs.ai/recruiting-data-privacy page