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 IRL (Instawork Robotics Labs)
Researchers at UC Berkeley have identified a “100,000-year data gap”—the gulf between what trained AI language models and what physical robots actually have to learn from. Closing that gap is the defining infrastructure challenge of the physical AI era. IRL is Instawork’s answer to it. We deploy skilled workers into real commercial and residential environments—kitchens, warehouses, hotel floors, and homes—to capture the high-fidelity task data that the world’s leading robotics labs use to train their foundation models.
About the Role
Instawork Robotics creates the highest-quality, highest-diversity datasets for robotics and physical AI. We work with leading robotics builders and research labs to solve one of the most important challenges in robotics: closing the data gap. As a Platform Engineer, you will build the products, services, tools, and infrastructure that power IRL’s data collection, processing, and quality workflows. This is a hybrid product and infrastructure role: you will design platform capabilities for application engineers while also owning the reliability, scalability, cost efficiency, and operation of the systems behind them.
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You will collaborate across Engineering, Operations, and Business teams to translate customer requirements into clear, scalable technical solutions, leveraging AI methodologies to deliver high-quality products and efficient software workflows. You’ll work across distributed systems, Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, observability, and high-throughput data workflows—supporting a platform already processing 50+ PB of data and 600K+ hours of video.
You are someone who thrives in ambiguous problem spaces, has strong product instincts, and can translate customer needs into technical solutions that drive business outcomes.
Who You Are
- 5+ years of experience building and operating production software platforms.
- Experience designing platform products, backend services, developer tools, or internal systems.
- Proven experience managing Kubernetes clusters at scale in production.
- Strong understanding of distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, networking, storage, and observability.
- Experience with Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, and production operations.
- Strong programming and problem-solving skills.
- Experience with Python and Rust is preferred.
- Experience with AWS and Azure is preferred.
- Experience operating multi-cloud deployments is preferred.
- Experience with managed Kubernetes services such as Amazon EKS or Azure AKS is preferred.
- Experience designing cost-efficient cloud and platform architectures.
- Understanding of cloud cost management, capacity planning, resource utilization, and usage optimization.
What You’ll Do
- Design and build platform products, backend services, APIs, tools, and workflows used by application engineers.
- Manage, scale, and improve Kubernetes clusters supporting production workloads.
- Design and maintain reliable cloud infrastructure across AWS, Azure, and other cloud platforms.
- Build automation for infrastructure provisioning, deployments, upgrades, and operational workflows.
- Develop platform capabilities using Python, Rust, or other appropriate technologies.
- Improve observability through monitoring, logging, alerting, tracing, and capacity management.
- Define and improve service-level objectives, incident response processes, and recovery procedures.
- Monitor and optimize infrastructure costs across cloud services, Kubernetes workloads, and platform systems.
- Improve resource utilization through right-sizing, autoscaling, capacity planning, and cost-aware architecture decisions.
- Troubleshoot complex issues across platform services, Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, networking, storage, and applications.
- Participate in an on-call rotation and take ownership of diagnosing and resolving production issues.
- Support the infrastructure and product needs of high-throughput data and physical AI workflows.
Perks
- Free snacks
- Health Insurance
- Personal Insurance
- Flexible Hours
- Maternity/Paternity Leave
- Broadband Reimbursement
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 and Phoenix, 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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