Jakob is a Principal Investigator and Hector Endowed Fellow at the ELLIS Institute Tübingen, and Professor for "Machine Learning in Science" at the University of Tübingen and the Tübingen AI Center. Jakob's research is dedicated to enable scientific discovery through machine learning and artificial intelligence.  His group develops tools that perform key steps of the scientific process, from building and testing models to designing the next experiment, in close collaboration with experimental and computational researchers. His group develops and helps maintain open-source software,  such the sbi toolbox for simulation-based inference and Jaxley for differentiable simulation of biophysical neuron models.

He serves as a speaker of the Excellence Cluster "Machine Learning: New Perspectives for Science" and the DFG Collaborative Research Center "Robust Vision", and as Director of the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience. He is a member of the Max Planck ETH Center for Learning Systems.

Jakob studied mathematics at Oxford University, worked as a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, as a postdoc at the Gatsby Unit at University College London, and as a Bernstein Fellow in Tübingen. He was a Max Planck Group Leader at the Caesar Research Centre in Bonn, a Professor at the Centre for Cognitive Science at TU Darmstadt, and a Professor of Computational Neuroengineering at TU Munich. He was a member of the Young Academy of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (2013–2018) and a FENS Kavli Scholar of Excellence (2018–2023).