Senior 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.

We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer - Instawork Robotics to contribute to the development of next-generation products as a key team member driving impactful features from concept to production. You will collaborate across Engineering, Operations, and Business teams to translate customer requirements into clear, scalable technical solutions, leveraging AI methodologies to deliver high-quality products and efficient software workflows. You’ll work across distributed systems, Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, observability, and high-throughput data workflows—supporting a platform already processing 50+ PB of data and 600K+ hours of video.

You are someone who thrives in ambiguous problem spaces, has strong product instincts, and can translate customer needs into technical solutions that drive business outcomes.

Who You Are:

• 5+ years of professional experience with a focus on high-growth product environments, particularly in Robotics, AI/ML, and related fields.
• Strong coding and architectural proficiency—you prioritize moving quickly down the right path to ship reliable code daily
• Full-stack proficiency—comfortable across backend services, APIs, and modern frontends (React, Angular, or Vue.js)
• Strong product instincts—you translate customer needs into technical solutions that drive business outcomes
• AI-First mindset—expertly using AI coding tools to accelerate delivery without compromising architectural integrity
• Agile execution—you understand the lifecycle of a feature from local branch to production monitoring

Nice to Have

• Fluency in our core stack (Django, Python, React, and React Native) to accelerate time to impact and onboarding
• Experience with advanced deployment patterns, including feature flags, config driven behavior, and progressive rollouts
• Exposure to LLM based systems, including prompt engineering, tool call architectures, or agent workflows
• Experience with Kubernetes infrastructure, particularly across AWS and Azure or other multi cloud environments
• Exposure to large scale or multi region data infrastructure, including distributed data uploads, data center operations, or remote infrastructure management
• Experience supporting hardware fleets, including inventory management, device health monitoring, firmware or software versioning, and hardware reliability
• Familiarity with camera or multi sensor calibration, including intrinsics, extrinsics, temporal synchronization, calibration validation, or drift monitoring
• Exposure to firmware or embedded systems, particularly for camera, sensor, wearable, or other data capture devices
• Experience with perception systems such as SLAM, VIO, dense reconstruction, spatial mapping, data quality gating, or perception benchmarks and evaluation
• Familiarity with robotics data collection, imitation learning, VLA systems, or robot policy training
• Domain experience in two sided marketplaces or recruitment platforms

What You'll Do:

• Product Delivery – Collaborate with Ops and Business teams to translate customer needs into technical solutions and shape product requirements.
• Write Quality Code – Ship code that follows engineering best practices (DRY, maintainable) and is production-safe after code review.
• Collaborate Cross-Functionally – Work closely with Product, Design, and Data partners to ensure project alignment from concept through deployment.
• Drive Personal Growth – Proactively seek opportunities to sharpen skills through code reviews and architectural deep-dives with senior engineers.
• Own Features End-to-End – Drive feature development from coding through deployment, monitoring, QA, and iteration based on user feedback.
• Advocate for Best Practices – Champion engineering excellence and contribute to continuous improvement in developer tooling and experience.
• Contribute Technical Input – Provide input on team technical design, balancing short-term delivery with long-term scalable solutions.
• Practice Clear Communication – Communicate effectively through clear PR descriptions and proactively surfacing blockers before they become critical problems.

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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