Senior / Staff Software Engineer

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 rockstar Senior/Staff Engineer who is deeply excited about the robotics mission and thrives in an AI-first development environment. As a crucial 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).
We heavily leverage agentic models and workflows to write code. You won't just be typing lines; you will be directing AI agents, juggling multiple complex threads, and acting as the architectural brain. This means your engineering fundamentals must be absolute rock-solid. You need to know when the AI is hallucinating a bad pattern, how to optimize a system for petabyte scale, and how to keep the big picture in focus while moving at breakneck speed.

What You’ll Do

• Multiply Your Output: Use agentic AI models to write, refactor, and test code, juggling multiple workflows simultaneously to achieve 10x productivity.
• Architect for Scale: Design, build, and optimize backend systems and data pipelines capable of securely processing petabytes of global video and telemetry data.
• Master the Infrastructure: Own the health and scaling of our heavy-duty infrastructure. You'll be optimizing high-throughput AWS environments, managing complex ECS services for tasks like video transcoding, and ensuring deep observability with precise telemetry across CPU, memory, network, and disk IOPS.
• Platform Ownership: Lead the end-to-end technical development of Instawork Lens and Instawork Radiant, ensuring continuous quality assurance loops and seamless data enrichment.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with ML experts, mobile developers, data ops, and remote QA teams to translate frontier lab requirements into robust, production-ready systems.
• Mentorship & Influence: Act as a technical pillar. Review AI-generated and human-written code, guide architectural discussions, and raise the bar for engineering excellence across the team.

Who You Are

• Mission-Driven: You are genuinely excited about the robotics revolution and want to build the human advantage that powers it.
• Master of Fundamentals: You have 8+ years of experience and incredibly strong engineering fundamentals. You understand distributed systems, database internals, and network constraints deeply enough to guide AI agents to the right architectural decisions.
• Workflow Juggler: You are a rockstar at context-switching, managing multiple concurrent AI workflows, and tying disparate technical threads together into a cohesive product.
• 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.
• Deep Technical Chops: Extensive experience with cloud computing (AWS), container orchestration, full-stack or backend development (Python, Django, React), and scaling high-throughput pipelines.