Instawork
About this role
Instawork runs an AI powered labour marketplace for hourly work, backed by Benchmark, Spark Capital, Craft Ventures, Greylock and Y Combinator. Instawork Robotics Labs is its answer to what the posting calls the 100,000 year data gap: it deploys skilled workers into real kitchens, warehouses, hotel floors and homes to capture the high fidelity task data that robotics labs use to train foundation models. This role owns the technical execution for that data platform, building Instawork Lens for global data collection and Prism for quality assurance. The posting wants a generalist explicitly: as comfortable designing a clean React interface as tuning heavy video transcoding pipelines in AWS. Infrastructure work includes managing ECS services for transcoding with deep telemetry across CPU, memory, network and disk IOPS. The team uses agentic coding models heavily and says it relies on your engineering intuition to keep the systems sound.
Who this is for
What the posting requires:
- 6+ years of software engineering experience, described as being a master of fundamentals.
- Full stack versatility: able to move between frontend, backend and infrastructure and own features end to end.
- Comfort designing user experience in React and diving into AWS to tune heavy video transcoding pipelines.
- Ability to architect and scale cloud environments, including complex AWS infrastructure and ECS services.
- Deep observability practice, with precise telemetry across CPU, memory, network and disk IOPS.
- Ability to design and optimise data pipelines at scale.
- Strong engineering intuition and architectural expertise, since the team leverages agentic coding models heavily and relies on human judgement for whether systems are built the right way.
What the work actually looks like:
- Own the technical execution for massive scale physical AI training data.
- Lead technical development of Instawork Lens, the global data collection platform, and the dedicated QA platform, ensuring high throughput data enrichment, labelling and continuous quality assurance loops.
- Architect and scale cloud environments, managing AWS infrastructure and ECS services for video transcoding.
- Design and optimise data pipelines capable of operating at scale.
- Act as a key engineering leader in the Bengaluru hub.
What the business actually does, since it is unusual: Instawork Robotics Labs deploys skilled hourly workers into real commercial and residential environments to capture task data, which leading robotics labs then use to train their foundation models. The posting frames closing this data gap as the defining infrastructure challenge of the physical AI era.
Location and working pattern: Bengaluru. Office days are not stated.
Honest fit guidance: the posting asks for a generalist and means it, so specialists who have only worked in one layer will struggle against the breadth requirement. Video pipeline and transcoding experience is the part most candidates will lack. If you like owning infrastructure and product surface at once, and the physical AI data problem interests you, six years is a fair bar for the scope described.
- 6+ years of software engineering experience, described as being a master of fundamentals.
- Full stack versatility: able to move between frontend, backend and infrastructure and own features end to end.
- Comfort designing user experience in React and diving into AWS to tune heavy video transcoding pipelines.
- Ability to architect and scale cloud environments, including complex AWS infrastructure and ECS services.
- Deep observability practice, with precise telemetry across CPU, memory, network and disk IOPS.
- Ability to design and optimise data pipelines at scale.
- Strong engineering intuition and architectural expertise, since the team leverages agentic coding models heavily and relies on human judgement for whether systems are built the right way.
What the work actually looks like:
- Own the technical execution for massive scale physical AI training data.
- Lead technical development of Instawork Lens, the global data collection platform, and the dedicated QA platform, ensuring high throughput data enrichment, labelling and continuous quality assurance loops.
- Architect and scale cloud environments, managing AWS infrastructure and ECS services for video transcoding.
- Design and optimise data pipelines capable of operating at scale.
- Act as a key engineering leader in the Bengaluru hub.
What the business actually does, since it is unusual: Instawork Robotics Labs deploys skilled hourly workers into real commercial and residential environments to capture task data, which leading robotics labs then use to train their foundation models. The posting frames closing this data gap as the defining infrastructure challenge of the physical AI era.
Location and working pattern: Bengaluru. Office days are not stated.
Honest fit guidance: the posting asks for a generalist and means it, so specialists who have only worked in one layer will struggle against the breadth requirement. Video pipeline and transcoding experience is the part most candidates will lack. If you like owning infrastructure and product surface at once, and the physical AI data problem interests you, six years is a fair bar for the scope described.
Apply on company site
Opens job-boards.greenhouse.io, the employer's own application page. Applying is always free.