Staff Software Engineer - Instawork Robotics

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, homes - to capture the high-fidelity task data that the world’s leading Robotics labs use to train their foundation models. Read more here . 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 Prism (our dedicated QA platform). 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 8+ 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 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 inco