Head of Operations

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. The Role The Head of Operations reports to Sauraj (Co-CEO, GTM and Operations) and take ownership of operational excellence company-wide. As Finance, Legal, People, IT and InfoSec, and Compliance grow into their own functions, this person partners with each lead on the operational side of their work and holds the whole together as one system. They lead the operations team and grow it into one fit for a company many times our current size. - Builds the operating engine for growth and scale. Owns how the company runs operationally and designs the processes that hold up as headcount, revenue, and complexity grow fast. Everything breaks at each new stage of growth; this person sees it coming and rebuilds ahead of the curve so operations never becomes the ceiling on how fast we can move. - Drives operational excellence across every function. Accountable for the operational side of finance, people, legal, and the wider back office, with IT, InfoSec, and compliance covered through the relevant leads. You will set the standard and makes sure nothing important falls between functions. - Brings order to ambiguity. Takes the most complex, cross-functional problems and drives them to resolution bringing all the right stakeholder to the table, motivating and inspiring them to come together and deliver the project for everyone’s benefit. - Is a decision partner. Frames trade-offs, surfaces risk early, and turns decisions into action, so the leadership team works from reliable data and sound judgment. - Builds and inspires the operations team. Hires, develops, and leads an operations team people want to be part of, and sets a standard of execution that raises the bar for everyone who works with them. Who we're looking for Essential: - High-growth experience above all. Has operated inside a company through rapid scaling, seen what breaks at each stage, and built the processes and structures that scaled through it. This is the most important thing we are looking for. - Global operating experience. Has run operations across multiple countries and regions, comfortable holding a company together across time zones and jurisdictions, not just in a single market. - Broad operations ownership. Has driven operational excellence across two or more of finance, people, legal, and business operations as a senior generalist, partnering with specialist leads rather than owning their decis…