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
Every dataset IRL ships starts as raw video: multi-camera rigs recording a worker palletizing a warehouse order, cooking a meal, or turning over a hotel room. Many hours of synchronized streams per session, plus the telemetry captured alongside them, growing into petabytes.
As a Video Platform Engineer, you'll own the pipeline that turns that raw capture into training-ready data: ingest, transcode, time-synchronization, automate video quality checks, indexing, and delivery to the robotics labs that train on it.
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This is a hybrid media-engineering and distributed-systems role. You'll make codec and container decisions. You'll design orchestration that survives a rig failing mid-session. And you'll own the cost per captured hour of processing.
You'll help shape the roadmap by working directly with the data collection teams in the field, and you'll have real say in which of their problems we solve first.
Who You Are
- 5+ years building and operating production video or media processing systems at scale.
- Hands-on, production experience with FFmpeg, GStreamer, or an equivalent media framework. You've built a pipeline around it and debugged it under load.
- Fluency in codecs and containers: H.264/HEVC/AV1, MP4/fMP4, and the practical tradeoffs between them.
- Strong understanding of distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, object storage, and observability.
- Strong programming and problem solving skills.
- Experience with durable workflow orchestration (Temporal, Conductor, Step Functions, Airflow, or similar).
- Experience designing cost-efficient architectures for large media or data workloads, and a working understanding of storage tiering, egress, capacity planning, and GPU utilization.
- Experience with Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, and production operations.
Preferred**
- Multi-camera, multi-view, or time-synchronized capture systems, and the clock-drift and alignment problems that come with them.
- Robotics or sensor data formats: MCAP, rosbag, ROS/ROS2, Parquet, or similar columnar and log formats.
- Familiarity with machine learning on video or images. Classification, detection and tracking, segmentation, re-identification, super-resolution, quality scoring, auto-annotation, redaction.
- Perceptual quality measurement (VMAF or equivalent) and encoding-ladder design.
- Streaming and packaging formats: HLS, DASH, CMAF, and DRM integration.
- Range across the stack. If you've built the annotation or review tooling on top of your own pipeline, we want to hear about it.
What You'll Do
- Design and build the ingest path from capture rigs to cloud storage, resilient to partial uploads, flaky field networks, and mid-session hardware failure.
- Build transcoding and normalization pipelines that turn heterogeneous rig output into consistent, analysis-ready media.
- Time-synchronize multi-camera video with telemetry and sensor streams into coherent, labeled episodes.
- Build automated quality checks that flag unusable sessions before they reach a customer - blur, exposure failure, dropped frames, etc.
- Design dataset versioning, lineage, and indexing so that any shipped episode can be traced back to its raw capture.
- Build the delivery path that gets datasets to robotics labs, including packaging, integrity verification, and access control.
- Own cost per captured hour and cost per delivered dataset: storage tiering and lifecycle, egress, encoding efficiency, and GPU utilization.
- Improve observability across the pipeline—monitoring, logging, tracing, and per-stage throughput and failure metrics.
- Troubleshoot complex issues spanning media tooling, storage, networking, and application code.
- Participate in an on-call rotation and own diagnosis and resolution of production issues.
- Participate in code reviews and raise the technical bar through clear, practical feedback.
- Own complex initiatives from problem definition through design, implementation, and operation.
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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