ML Engineer - Instawork Robotics

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.

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 reimagining the way the world works.

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.

About the Role

Instawork's on-demand labor marketplace is uniquely valuable for robotics and physical AI training. We're working with leading frontier labs to create the highest-quality, highest-diversity dataset for training robotics foundation models. Instawork Robotics is the human advantage in the robotics revolution.

The Instawork Robotics ML Engineer will help build and scale the technology powering physical AI training data.

Key Responsibilities

• Model Development - design, build, and maintain the data labeling and enrichment pipeline at the foundation of Instawork Robotics' data offering
• Pipeline Optimization - identify and implement continuous improvements to our data pipeline to improve efficiency, scalability, and quality
• Dataset Quality - develop methodologies and analytics to measure the quality and performance of our dataset and ML models
• Research Reviews - stay on top of academic research and industry best practices related to robotics learning and training
• Cross-Functional Collaboration - work closely with robotics leadership, data ops, QA, and other engineering teams to ensure alignment from concept to deployment

Requirements

• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience, excluding internships
• Master's or PhD in an AI or ML-related field and 1+ years of professional experience building ML or CV models for robotics or autonomous vehicle applications
• Expertise with data pipelines, distributed systems, cloud computing on AWS infrastructure, and scalable data processing for large-scale datasets
• Background in identifying and translating techniques from academic research and frontier labs into production systems
• Problem-solving ability with experience building new-to-world systems and applying creativity and grit to create value for robotics partners

Nice-to-haves

• 3+ years experience designing or architecting production distributed systems
• Experience shipping production code at an early-stage or mid-stage startup
• Experience participating in technical discussions with external partners and customers

Compensation and Benefits

For CA based applicants:

• Base salary: $170,000 - $200,000
• Equity in the form of stock options
• Medical, dental, and vision plans with coverage beginning on the date of hire
• Flexible paid time off
• At least 8 paid company holidays annually
• Phone stipend
• Commuter stipend
• Supplemental pay on qualified leaves
• Employee health savings accounts (HSA) contribution
• Flexible spending plans
• 401K plan
• Perkspot - discount program through Lumity

A variety of factors are considered when determining someone's compensation including a candidate's professional background, experience, and location. Final offer amounts may vary from the amounts listed above.

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.

Work Environment

We have hubs in San Francisco, Bangalore, and Chicago, and 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 value diverse perspectives and encourage applications from candidates of all backgrounds.