Senior Software Engineer

Overview

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 Instawork

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.

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 Role

We are looking for a highly versatile Senior/Staff Engineer with rock-solid fundamentals who can confidently tackle any problem across the tech stack. As a key 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 Radiant (our dedicated QA platform).

You are a generalist at heart. You are just as comfortable designing a clean user experience in React as you are diving deep into AWS to tune heavy video transcoding pipelines. While we leverage agentic models heavily to accelerate our coding output, we rely on your deep engineering intuition, architectural expertise, and flawless fundamentals to ensure our systems are robust, scalable, and built the right way.

What You’ll Do

• Full-Stack Versatility: Seamlessly transition between frontend, backend, and infrastructure. You will own features end-to-end, solving whatever technical challenge stands in the way of shipping.
• Platform Ownership: Lead the technical development of Instawork Lens and Instawork Radiant, ensuring high-throughput data enrichment, labeling, and continuous quality assurance loops.
• Infrastructure & Video Pipelines: Architect and scale our cloud environments. You will manage complex AWS infrastructure and ECS services for video transcoding, ensuring deep observability with precise telemetry across CPU, memory, network, and disk IOPS.
• Architect for Scale: Design and optimize data pipelines capable of securely processing petabytes of global video and telemetry data without bottlenecking.
• AI-Leveraged Engineering: Use agentic models as a force multiplier to ship faster, relying on your deep engineering fundamentals to guide the AI, spot bad patterns, and make the final architectural decisions.
• Cross-Functional Mentorship: Act as a technical pillar for the team. Guide mid- and senior-level engineers through code reviews, pair programming, and architectural discussions to raise the bar for engineering excellence.

Who You Are

• Master of Fundamentals: You have 6+ years of software engineering experience. You deeply understand distributed systems, database internals, and network constraints, and you write clean, maintainable code (coding ~80% of the time).
• True Generalist: Extensive experience with full-stack development (Python, Django, React, or similar modern frameworks) and a willingness to learn whatever language or tool is needed for the job.
• Cloud & Infrastructure Chops: Hands-on experience designing scalable backend systems and managing cloud infrastructure (AWS, ECS/Docker, CloudWatch), particularly for data-heavy or high-throughput applications.
• 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 product quickly without sacrificing quality.
• Mission-Driven: You are genuinely excited about the robotics revolution and want to build the human advantage that powers it.

Our Values

• Empathy, Trust & Candor: We build trust through honest and direct feedback.
• Bias for Action: We practice high-velocity decision-making and course-correct quickly.
• Always Be Learning: With AI transforming our workplace, we continuously compound our knowledge.
• Act Like an Owner: Your ability to impact Instawork is limited only by your courage and conviction, not your job description.

Our Values

• Empathy, Trust & Candor
• We 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 Action
• We 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 Learning
• We’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 Owner
• We 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.