Finance Lead (FP&A)

WHO WE ARE

Foundation models have transformed text and images, but structured data - the largest and most consequential data modality in the world - has remained untouched. Tables power every clinical trial, every financial model, every scientific experiment, every business decision. No one has built a foundation model that truly understands 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 in Nature https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08328-6 and set a new state-of-the-art for tabular machine learning. Since its release, we've scaled model capabilities more than 20x, reached 3M+ downloads, 6,000+ GitHub stars, and are seeing accelerating adoption across research and industry - 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/ to improving clinical trial decisions with BostonGene https://priorlabs.ai/case-studies/boston-gene.

The hardest work is in front of us. We're scaling tabular foundation models to handle millions of rows, thousands of features, real-time inference, and entirely new data modalities - while building the infrastructure to deploy 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 https://priorlabs.ai/about of 20+ engineers, researchers and GTM specialists, selected from over 5,000 applicants, with backgrounds spanning Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, G-Research, Jane Street, Goldman Sachs, 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 world-leading AI researchers such as Bernhard Schölkopf and Turing Award winner Yann LeCun. We ship fast, create 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 optimal time to join.

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 our board, investors, and parent company, 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

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 https://priorlabs.ai/privacy to see exactly what we collect, why, and how long we keep it.