Associate Director - Operations - Instawork Robotics Labs

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 IRL (Instawork Robotics Labs)

Researchers at UC Berkeley have identified a “100,000-year data gap” - the gulf between what trained AI language models and what physical robots actually have to learn from. Closing that gap is the defining infrastructure challenge of the physical AI era. IRL is Instawork’s answer to it. We deploy skilled workers into real commercial and residential environments - kitchens, warehouses, hotel floors, homes - to capture the high-fidelity task data that the world’s leading Robotics labs use to train their foundation models. Read more here.

Build. Scale. Operate.

We’re looking for a hardcore operations leader who thrives in the real world — someone who has built and scaled large, distributed operations from the ground up and knows what it takes to turn an idea into an operation that actually works.

This is not a role for someone who only manages dashboards, processes, or strategy decks.

We’re looking for a builder and operator, someone who can start with a blank sheet of paper, build the team, design the processes, solve problems on the ground, and scale the operation without losing speed or quality.

You’ll be operating in an environment where things change quickly, the problems are often ambiguous, and there is rarely a playbook to follow.

What You’ll Do

• Build and scale operations from the ground up — define the operating model, build processes, hire teams, establish metrics, and create the systems needed to scale.
• Own large, distributed, real-world operations across multiple locations, teams, and workflows.
• Build high-performing teams — hire exceptional operators, develop leaders, set a high bar for execution, and create a culture of ownership and accountability.
• Turn chaos into structure — identify operational bottlenecks, build repeatable processes, and continuously improve how the organization operates.
• Be relentlessly execution-oriented — when something breaks, you don’t wait for someone else to solve it. You get to the ground, understand the problem, and figure it out.
• Operate at speed — priorities will change, plans will move, and unexpected problems will come up. You’ll need to make decisions quickly and keep the team moving.
• Build for scale — design processes and teams that can handle 10x growth, not just solve today’s problem.
• Own outcomes, not just activities — set clear operational metrics and relentlessly drive performance, quality, productivity, and efficiency.

What We’re Looking For

You’ve built before.

• Significant experience building and running large, distributed, real-world operations.
• Experience in e-commerce, logistics, marketplaces, field operations, fast-scaling startups, hardware-adjacent businesses, or other operationally intensive environments.
• A track record of building teams and operating models from scratch, not just inheriting established ones.
• Strong people leadership experience, with the ability to build teams that are highly accountable, ambitious, and deeply committed to the mission.
• Extremely high ownership — you naturally think, “I’ll figure it out.”
• Extreme agility and resilience.
• Plans change → you adapt, rather than freeze.
• Pressure increases → you become clearer and more decisive.
• Something breaks → you go after the root cause.
• Strong operational judgment — you know when to build a process, when to break one, and when to simply get things done.
• Comfortable working with incomplete information and making decisions without waiting for perfect data.
• A strong bias toward action, with the ability to balance speed, quality, cost, and scale.

The Kind of Leader We Want

You’re the person who:

• Can walk into a messy operation and figure out what needs to happen next.
• Has built teams from a handful of people into large, high-performing organizations.
• Can spend the morning looking at operational metrics and the afternoon solving a problem on the ground.
• Doesn’t need a perfect org structure or playbook to get started.
• Sets an extremely high bar — but earns trust by giving the team the support, context, and ownership to meet it.
• Builds teams that want to run through walls for them.
• Is calm when things are chaotic and gets more focused when the pressure goes up.
• Gets excited by operational complexity rather than intimidated by it.
• Has experience with robotics, AI data collection, or hardware operations

Bonus, Not Required

Experience or exposure to:

• Supply chain or manufacturing operations
• Field workforce operations
• Marketplace operations
• Multi-city / multi-location scaling
• Building operations in an early-stage or rapidly scaling startup

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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