Hardware Intern — Robotics & AI

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.

Instawork Robotics Labs (IRL India) · Bengaluru · Internship (Full-time, On-site)

Build the hardware that teaches robots about the real world Robots learn from data — and the best data comes from the real world, captured at scale. At IRL India, we’re building Instacore, our proprietary 5-camera + IMU wearable capture rig that records rich, egocentric video of humans doing real tasks in real environments. Hundreds of these units run across India every day, feeding the training pipelines of frontier Physical AI models.

Your job: keep this fleet alive, fast, and growing. If you’ve spent nights in a workshop before a Robocon run, wrenched on a Formula Student or BAJA vehicle, or built anything that had to actually work under pressure — this role was designed for you.

What you’ll do

• Own uptime for the Instacore fleet. Build, assemble, test, and troubleshoot the mechanical and electrical systems that keep hundreds of units capturing data daily.
• Ship hardware iterations fast. Work directly with our robotics team to prototype, integrate, and stress-test improvements to the rig — cameras, IMUs, wiring, mounts, power
• Get your hands dirty. Sensors, actuators, controllers, soldering irons, 3D printers — this is a workshop role, not a slideware role.
• Travel and deploy. Set up hardware hubs across India and APAC. You’ll see your work running in the field, not just on a bench.
• Debug like a detective. Trace faults through hands-on testing, fix them, and document what you learned so the fleet gets more reliable every week.
• Keep the lab sharp. Maintain tools, components, test setups, and build documentation the whole team relies on.
• What we’re looking forPursuing or recently completed a degree/diploma in Mechanical, Mechatronics, Electronics, Electrical, Robotics, or a related field.
• Battle scars from Robocon, Formula Student/FSAE, BAJA, e-Yantra, or similar competitions — especially if you spent months building a vehicle or robot that had to perform on demand
• Hands-on experience with IoT systems, cameras, sensors, Raspberry Pi, 3D printing, and soldering.
• Working knowledge of motors, sensors, actuators, electronics, mechanical systems, and wiring.
• A bias for figuring things out: you’d rather open the enclosure and probe the board than wait for someone to tell you the answer.
• Willingness to travel PAN-India and across APAC for deployments.
• Leadership: Demonstrated leadership by leading a team/project during Robocon, Formula Student, robotics competitions, or similar engineering projects, taking ownership from planning through execution.

Why this internship is different

• Real fleet, real stakes. Your fixes directly determine how many hours of robot-training data get captured this week.
• Frontier of Physical AI. The data you help collect trains some of the world’s most advanced robotics foundation models.
• Full-stack hardware exposure. From soldering a connector to deploying a hub in a new city — you’ll touch the entire lifecycle.
• Small team, big ownership. You’ll work directly with senior robotics engineers and see your ideas shipped in days, not quarters.
• Sound like you? We want to see what you’ve built. Share photos, videos, or repos of your competition machines and projects along with your application.

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.

Personnel Privacy Policy