Research Engineer, Foundation Model

About The Role

Tabular data breaks the assumptions that make scaling work for language and vision. There's no natural sequence, no spatial structure, no shared vocabulary across datasets. The architectures and scaling laws that power LLMs don't transfer. We've made the first breakthrough with TabPFN — but the hardest problems are still ahead.

At Prior Labs, Research Engineers aren't supporting scientists — they are the science team. You'll design experiments, contribute to papers, and write the code that turns architectural ideas into trained models. We create cutting edge research because the same people do both. As an early team member, you'll have significant technical ownership and room to grow as we scale.

The problems we're solving:

• Scaling transformer architectures from 10K to 1M+ samples — without the structural assumptions that make language models scale
• Building multimodal models that combine tabular, text, and numerical understanding
• Making models efficient enough for real-world deployment — not just accurate enough for a paper
• Designing architectures for time series, forecasting, anomaly detection, and multiple related tables

Day-to-day, you'll design and test novel architectures, run ablations, analyze scaling behavior, and write the training and evaluation infrastructure that makes rapid experimentation possible. We hold software quality to the same standard as research quality.

What we're looking for:

• Master's or PhD in Computer Science or a related field, plus 3+ years of experience building ML systems in research or industry
• Publications at top ML venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, etc.) or equivalent demonstrated research impact (widely used open-source, deployed systems)
• Deep proficiency in Python, PyTorch, and the broader ML and data science ecosystem (scikit-learn, pandas, NumPy), with strong software engineering practices
• Experience implementing and training neural network architectures — ideally transformers or foundation models
• Solid understanding of training dynamics, scaling behavior, and common failure modes in deep learning systems
• Genuine interest in model efficiency — making large models faster, more scalable, and practical to deploy

Nice to have:

• Experience at an early-stage startup or as a founding engineer
• Contributions to open-source ML libraries or tools
• Experience with model distillation, inference optimization, or on-device ML
• Background in tabular data, time series, or other structured data — helpful but not required

Life at Prior Labs:

We're a small, ambitious team solving one of the hardest problems in AI, and we're just getting started. You'll work closely with world-class researchers and builders who care deeply about the quality of their craft, the impact of their work, and the people they work with.

We move fast, we think rigorously, and we take the time to do things right. If you're excited by hard problems, motivated by real-world impact, and want to be part of building something that matters, we'd love to hear from you.

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.