Legal Counsel

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 Reporting to the CEO, you'll own legal across the company: commercial contracts, IP, data privacy, post-acquisition governance, and everything in between. This is a hands-on senior IC role. You'll be the person who does the work, builds the systems, and becomes the one place the team turns to on any legal question. You'll handle what you can and manage specialist external counsel for everything else. YOUR RESPONSIBILITIES - Be the team's single point of contact for all legal requests. Triage what can be handled in-house, manage external counsel for everything else, and build the systems that keep legal from becoming a bottleneck. - Own the legal workstream arising from the SAP acquisition: corporate structure, IP ownership, governance documentation, and the ongoing legal relationship with the parent company. - Take ownership of commercial contracting end-to-end: negotiate and redline MSAs, NDAs, DPAs, and vendor agreements, and build a standard template library so routine deals don't require counsel at all. - Build the legal function from the ground up: a contract management system, policy library, and internal escalation playbook that gives the team clear guardrails and scales beyond you. - Define and protect Prior Labs' IP and open-source legal posture, including the boundary between TabPFN's open-source release and commercial product: licensing strategy, patents, trademarks, and contributor agreements. - Bringing in and manage specialist external counsel where the depth or jurisdiction requires it. WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR Must have - 3+ years as in-house counsel at a tech or AI company - Has personally owned a major corporate transaction or M&A process from the legal side - Has negotiated commercial agreements (MSAs, DPAs, NDAs) directly with counterparties, without outside counsel carrying the work - Track record managing external counsel: selecting firms, scoping mandates, controlling spend - Has built or significantly shaped a legal function at an early-stage company (first or second in-house hire) - Comfortable operating across both EU/German and US legal frameworks Nice to have - Open-source licensing or software IP experience - Experience with cap table management 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