careerladder.fyi › Career paths › Black Forest Labs
How people got jobs at Black Forest Labs
What 49 people did before they joined Black Forest Labs: where they worked, what they studied, which role they came in through, and how long it took.
49
people in our data got there
69%
had a graduate degree first (of those listing one)
10
typical years since first job
- The most common step right before: from other companies (55%).
- The most common way in was Business & operations (31% joined in that kind of role).
- Of those who list their education, 69% had a graduate degree before arriving and 12% a PhD.
- The typical person arrived about 10 years after their first job.
- The most common earlier employer: Stability AI (22% had worked there).
How Black Forest Labs compares
- 12% had a PhD, below the 20% across other frontier AI labs.
- People arrived about 3 years earlier in their careers than at the typical one of the other frontier AI labs (10 vs 13 years since their first job).
Among people who list their education; places with at least 10 such people.
Show as a table
| People listing education | Share | |
|---|---|---|
| Google DeepMind | 58 | 41% |
| World Labs | 39 | 33% |
| Physical Intelligence | 31 | 32% |
| Sakana AI | 41 | 29% |
| Cohere | 40 | 28% |
| Hugging Face | 34 | 24% |
| Stability AI | 40 | 22% |
| SpaceXAI | 17 | 18% |
| Thinking Machines Lab | 29 | 17% |
| OpenAI | 41 | 17% |
| Anthropic | 28 | 14% |
| Black Forest Labs (this page) | 32 | 12% |
| EleutherAI | 26 | 12% |
| Reflection | 20 | 10% |
| Mistral AI | 36 | 8% |
| Skild AI | 39 | 8% |
| Poolside | 31 | 6% |
| Cognition | 27 | 4% |
| Perplexity | 24 | <1% |
Show as a table
| Median years | ||
|---|---|---|
| SpaceXAI | 18 yrs | |
| Anthropic | 15 yrs | |
| Mistral AI | 15 yrs | |
| OpenAI | 14 yrs | |
| Perplexity | 14 yrs | |
| Reflection | 14 yrs | |
| Thinking Machines Lab | 14 yrs | |
| Stability AI | 14 yrs | |
| Poolside | 13 yrs | |
| Cognition | 13 yrs | |
| Cohere | 13 yrs | |
| Black Forest Labs (this page) | 10 yrs | |
| Physical Intelligence | 10 yrs | |
| Google DeepMind | 10 yrs | |
| Sakana AI | 9 yrs | |
| Skild AI | 9 yrs | |
| World Labs | 8 yrs | |
| Hugging Face | 8 yrs | |
| EleutherAI | 5 yrs |
Which role they joined in
Kinds of role with fewer than 5 people are combined into "All other roles".
Show as a table
| People | Share | |
|---|---|---|
| Business & operations | 15 | 31% |
| All other roles | 22 | 45% |
| Member of technical staff | 7 | 14% |
| Software engineering | 5 | 10% |
Show as a table
| People | Share | |
|---|---|---|
| Member of Technical Staff | 7 | 14% |
What they did right before
Show as a table
| People | Share | |
|---|---|---|
| From other companies | 27 | 55% |
| From frontier AI labs | 12 | 24% |
| From Big Tech | 6 | 12% |
| Other | 4 | 8% |
Where they worked before
A person can count under more than one employer.
Show as a table
| People | Share | |
|---|---|---|
| Stability AI | 11 | 22% |
| Amazon Web Services (AWS) | 5 | 10% |
Education
Among the 32 of 49 people who list their education.
Show as a table
| People | Share | |
|---|---|---|
| Bachelor's | 10 | 31% |
| Master's | 17 | 53% |
| MBA | 1 | 3% |
| PhD | 4 | 12% |
How much experience they had
Among the 46 of 49 people with an earlier job listed.
Show as a table
| People | Share | |
|---|---|---|
| 1-3 years | 3 | 7% |
| 3-5 years | 3 | 7% |
| 5-8 years | 8 | 17% |
| 8-12 years | 14 | 30% |
| 12+ years | 18 | 39% |
Where would your path lead?
Paste your LinkedIn or resume and see the ladders people like you climbed to Black Forest Labs, and how each step changes your chances.
Plan my path to Black Forest Labs →
Paste your LinkedIn or resume and see the ladders people like you climbed to Black Forest Labs, and how each step changes your chances.
Plan my path to Black Forest Labs →
Related
How these numbers are made. From 3k+ public career histories collected for careerladder.fyi (dated jobs, degrees and publications). The collection was built around particular employers, so people who reached well-known tech, AI and finance employers are over-represented: read shares as "among people in this dataset", not as hiring odds. Names are shown only when at least 5 people are behind them; smaller groups are combined into "Other". No individual profile is shown. Updated November 2026.