Your missionReporting to the COO, 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 forMust 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 LabsWe'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.
