Senior Operations Manager

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 Instawork Robotics Labs 

Instawork Robotics Labs is a new initiative within Instawork. We work with the world’s leading robotics and AI labs to collect, manage, and deliver high-quality training data at scale - using a worker network of 10M+ professionals across the US and six countries. This is early. This is foundational. What we build now will define the next decade of robotics.

Why this role exists (read this first)

At Instawork Robotics Labs, we’re building the operational backbone that powers robotics and AI labs across the world. Not dashboards. Not pilots. Real data, at real scale, in real environments.This role is for someone who doesn’t only want to run ops. They want to build the operating system.
If you’ve ever looked at chaos and thought “give me 30 days and a mandate” - keep reading.

What you’ll actually do 

You will own and execute end-to-end robotics data collection programs in the APAC region. That means:

• Launching new data collection programs from zero
• Setting up residential homes, offices, Airbnbs, and field locations from scratch
• Designing workflows that work in the real world, not slides

• Running multi-city, multi-country operations
• Recruiting, onboarding, training, and managing large worker cohorts across APAC
• Ensuring diversity, quality, speed, and safety at scale
• Leading leaders
• Managing Team Leads, Trainers, QA Leads, and Ops Managers running parallel programs
• Holding the bar on output, quality, and velocity
• Working with external muscle
• Partnering with BBOs, staffing firms, logistics vendors to rapidly scale capacity
• Knowing when to build in-house vs. augment externally
• Executing under ambiguity
• Client requirements will change, Data specs will evolve
• Timelines will compress
• You will adapt fast and still deliver
• Being on the ground
• Travel is part of the job
• You’ll see operations where they actually happen, not just through reports

What makes this role hard (and fun)

• No playbooks exist — you’ll write them
• Scale will come before perfection
• Every project looks different
• Failure is fast, learning is faster
• Quality is non-negotiable

If that excites you, you’re in the right place.

What we’re looking for (beyond the résumé)

We don’t care about fancy titles. We care about operators. You’re likely a fit if you have:

• 15 years of operations experience
  (10 years acceptable for IIT/IIM grads with strong execution depth)
• Experience running large, distributed, real-world operations
  E-commerce, logistics, marketplaces, fast-scaling startups, field ops, or hardware-adjacent orgs
• A highly analytical mindset
• You think in throughput, yield, SLAs, cost curves, and failure modes
• You’re comfortable living inside dashboards and ground reality at the same time
• Extreme agility and resilience
• Plans change - you don’t freeze
• Pressure rises - you get clearer
• Strong people leadership
• You build teams people want to run through walls for
• You demand a lot, and you give more
• Comfort working across cultures and time zones
• India, US, and 6+ countries
• Clear communication, zero ego
• Bonus (not required): exposure to robotics, hardware, AI data, or supply chain ops

Why join now

• Zero legacy, full ownership
• Direct exposure to global AI & robotics leaders
• Build something that hasn’t been built before
• High visibility with leadership
• Learn faster than anywhere else
  
  

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, 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 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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