Intro
- Instawork is on a mission to create meaningful economic opportunities for skilled hourly professionals in communities around the globe. Our AI-powered labor marketplace helps local businesses scale, and enables global technology companies to push the frontiers of robotics and AI. Backed by world-class investors like Benchmark, Spark Capital, Craft Ventures, Greylock, Y Combinator, and others, we’re looking for exceptional talent to reimagine the way the world works.
About InstaworkInstawork is on a mission to create meaningful economic opportunities for skilled hourly professionals in communities around the globe. Our AI-powered labor marketplace helps local businesses scale, and enables global technology companies to push the frontiers of robotics and AI.About Instawork Robot Labs (IRL)We are operating as a fast-paced, 0-to-1 startup within Instawork, currently at the exact phase of growth that Scale AI experienced when LLMs first needed massive data and annotation. We are working across the world to collect data at a petabyte scale, helping frontline companies train and build cutting-edge robotics foundation models.We have already hit a rapid scale of over 10,000 hours of data collected per day. Our unique focus is on capturing rich, diverse household data—not controlled factory environments. Our multi-pronged strategy spans across robot wranglers, robot training data, model benchmarking, and ultimately, building a marketplace to get "work" done, whether by humans or robotics.The RoleWe are looking for a rockstar Senior/Staff Engineer who is deeply excited about the robotics mission and thrives in an AI-first development environment. As a crucial engineering leader in our Bengaluru hub, you will own the technical execution for massive-scale physical AI training data, building out core systems like Instawork Lens (our global data collection platform) and Instawork Prism (our dedicated QA platform).We heavily leverage agentic models and workflows to write code. You won't just be typing lines; you will be directing AI agents, juggling multiple complex threads, and acting as the architectural brain. This means your engineering fundamentals must be absolute rock-solid. You need to know when the AI is hallucinating a bad pattern, how to optimize a system for petabyte scale, and how to keep the big picture in focus while moving at breakneck speed.What You’ll Do
- Multiply Your Output: Use agentic AI models to write, refactor, and test code, juggling multiple workflows simultaneously to achieve 10x productivity.
- Architect for Scale: Design, build, and optimize backend systems and data pipelines capable of securely processing petabytes of global video and telemetry data.
- Master the Infrastructure: Own the health and scaling of our heavy-duty infrastructure. You'll be optimizing high-throughput AWS environments, managing complex ECS services for tasks like video transcoding, and ensuring deep observability with precise telemetry across CPU, memory, network, and disk IOPS.
- Platform Ownership: Lead the end-to-end technical development of Instawork Lens and Instawork Radiant, ensuring continuous quality assurance loops and seamless data enrichment.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with ML experts, mobile developers, data ops, and remote QA teams to translate frontier lab requirements into robust, production-ready systems.
- Mentorship & Influence: Act as a technical pillar. Review AI-generated and human-written code, guide architectural discussions, and raise the bar for engineering excellence across the team.
Who You Are
- Mission-Driven: You are genuinely excited about the robotics revolution and want to build the human advantage that powers it.
- Master of Fundamentals: You have 8+ years of experience and incredibly strong engineering fundamentals. You understand distributed systems, database internals, and network constraints deeply enough to guide AI agents to the right architectural decisions.
- Workflow Juggler: You are a rockstar at context-switching, managing multiple concurrent AI workflows, and tying disparate technical threads together into a cohesive product.
- Startup Mindset: You thrive in ambiguous, fast-paced, 0-1 environments. You act like an owner, practice high-velocity decision-making, and know how to ship.
- Deep Technical Chops: Extensive experience with cloud computing (AWS), container orchestration, full-stack or backend development (Python, Django, React), and scaling high-throughput pipelines.
Our Values
- Empathy, Trust & CandorWe put ourselves in the shoes of our colleagues and customers and don’t shy away from uncomfortable conversations, instead building trust through honest and direct feedback.
- Bias for ActionWe practice high-velocity decision-making, clear-eyed that we often operate with incomplete information. Growing quickly means it’s OK to be wrong, so long as we learn from our mistakes and course correct!
- Always Be LearningWe’re a curious bunch, and with AI transforming our workplace we encourage everyone to learn from each other, compounding our knowledge and experience to help us change an entire industry.
- Act Like an OwnerWe work long, hard, and smart, building products that delight our users and drive growth. Your ability to impact Instawork is limited only by your courage and conviction, not your job description.
About Instawork
- Founded in 2015, Instawork is the nation’s leading online labor marketplace for food services, hospitality, light industry, and logistics, connecting more than 7M skilled workers with local restaurants, hotels, warehouses, stadiums, and more. Our AI-powered platform serves thousands of businesses across more than 50 major markets in the United States and Canada. We're not just helping fill shifts, we're supporting local economies—and we're just getting started!
- Instawork has been featured by CBS News, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and the Associated Press. Forbes included us on their Next Billion Dollar Startups list; RetailTech Breakthrough named us Workforce Hiring Solution of the Year for 2025; and Inc. 5000 recognized us as one of the country's top 10% fastest-growing companies two years in a row. But what matters most is our impact. We're solving real problems for real people, and we’re doing it at scale.
- Join our team to help us build something that matters! We’re looking for superstars who want to help us shape the future of work. With hubs in San Francisco, Bangalore, and Chicago, city offices in New York, Phoenix, and Singapore, we're back to working together in-person five days a week because we believe the best ideas happen when great people collaborate face-to-face. We also value diverse perspectives and encourage applications from candidates of all backgrounds.Ready to make an impact? Learn more at www.instawork.com/about.
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