Platform Engineer - E3

About the role

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, and homes—to capture the high-fidelity task data that the world’s leading robotics labs use to train their foundation models.

About the Role

Instawork Robotics creates the highest-quality, highest-diversity datasets for robotics and physical AI. We work with leading robotics builders and research labs to solve one of the most important challenges in robotics: closing the data gap. As a Platform Engineer, you will build the products, services, tools, and infrastructure that power IRL’s data collection, processing, and quality workflows. This is a hybrid product and infrastructure role: you will design platform capabilities for application engineers while also owning the reliability, scalability, cost efficiency, and operation of the systems behind them.

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 experience building and operating production software platforms. - Experience designing platform products, backend services, developer tools, or internal systems. - Proven experience managing Kubernetes clusters at scale in production. - Strong understanding of distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, networking, storage, and observability. - Experience with Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, and production operations. - Strong programming and problem-solving skills. - Experience with Python and Rust is preferred. - Experience with AWS and Azure is preferred. - Experience operating multi-cloud deployments is preferred. - Experience with managed Kubernetes services such as Amazon EKS or Azure AKS is preferred. - Experience designing cost-efficient cloud and platform architectures. - Understanding of cloud cost management, capacity planning, resource utilization, and usage optimization.