Legal Counsel

About the role

Reporting 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 where 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.

What you'll do

• 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.
• Bring in and manage specialist external counsel where the depth or jurisdiction requires it.

What you'll need

• 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