QA Lead

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.

What you’ll do

• Lead Workforce & Operations: Drive day-to-day workforce management for Clippers, Graders, Regraders, SMEs, and ICs across shifts/sites, optimizing staffing, capacity planning, and throughput against SLA targets.

• Implement Quality Systems & Methods: Maintain the QMS and apply structured methods (RCA, CAPA, FMEA, 8D, SPC) to address recurring defects, calibration drift, gold-sample injections, and consensus checks.

• Own SOPs & Process Standards: Build, version-control, and continuously iterate SOPs for existing and new program launches, ensuring floor adoption and structured QA onboarding/re-calibration paths.

• Bridge Cross-Functional Teams: Translate engineering data requirements into floor-executable QA criteria, report field issues back with evidence, and represent QA in program launches and crisis calls.

• Drive Data-Led Quality: Monitor and analyze key QA metrics—defect/reject rates, inter-grader agreement (kappa), gold-sample pass rates, yield, and escalation volume—to root out quality degradation with data.

What we’re looking for

• Distributed QA/QC Leadership: Proven experience managing large or dispersed grading/QA teams across multiple shifts or sites.

• Quality Methods Depth: Strong working command and practical application of RCA, CAPA, FMEA, 8D, SPC, and QMS frameworks.

• Analytical & Data-Driven Mindset: Proven track record of building and interpreting quality dashboards, interrogating metrics, and quantifying operational trade-offs.

• Stakeholder & Communication Skills: Clear, structured communication skills across all levels—upward to leadership, cross-functionally with engineering, and directly to floor teams.

• Hands-on, High Ownership: A proactive problem-solver who thrives on the floor building processes and tackling operational challenges directly, rather than just administering them.

What success looks like

• QA metrics (defect rates, inter-grader agreement/kappa, gold-sample pass rates) show clear, measurable improvement across all programs.

• Quality issues and calibration drifts are caught early, analyzed via structured methods (RCA/CAPA/8D), and systematically resolved.

• SOPs are systematically updated, version-controlled, and seamlessly adopted on the floor with full operational alignment.

• Engineering requirements are accurately translated into actionable floor criteria, enabling smooth program launches and rapid feedback loops.

• Grading and QA operations scale smoothly across teams, shifts, and locations with balanced staffing and clear role execution.

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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