Founding Machine Learning Lead - Instawork Robotics

<div class="content-intro"><p>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.</p></div><p>Instawork’s on-demand labor marketplace is uniquely valuable for robotics and physical AI training. We’re working with leading frontier labs to create the highest-quality, highest-diversity dataset for training robotics foundation models. Instawork Robotics is the human advantage in the robotics revolution. </p> <p>The Instawork Robotics ML Lead will own the technology strategy for physical AI training data. </p> <p><strong>Who You Are:</strong></p> <ul> <li><strong>An mid-career developer,</strong> with at least 8 years of programming and/or engineering leadership experience, excluding internships.</li> <li><strong>A machine learning expert,</strong> with a Master’s or PhD in an AI or ML-related field and at least 2 years of professional experience building ML or CV models for robotics or autonomous vehicle applications.</li> <li><strong>Experienced with data pipelines,</strong> with expertise in distributed systems, cloud computing on AWS infrastructure, and scalable data processing for large-scale datasets.</li> <li><strong>An innovator,</strong> with a background in identifying and translating techniques from  academic research and frontier labs into production systems.</li> <li><strong>A problem-solver,</strong> who enjoys building new-to-world systems, sharing your technical expertise with other builders, and applying creativity and grit to create value for our robotics partners.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Nice-to-haves:</strong></p> <ul> <li>5+ years experience designing or architecting production distributed systems</li> <li>Experience shipping production code at an early-stage or mid-stage startup</li> <li>Comfort and presence leading technical discussions with external partners and customers</li> </ul> <p><strong>What You’ll Do:</strong></p> <ul> <li><strong>Model Development</strong> - plan, architect, and build the data labeling and enrichment pipeline at the foundation of Instawork Robotics’ data offering.</li> <li><strong>Pipeline Optimization</strong> - identify and implement continuous improvements to our data pipeline to improve efficiency, scalability, and quality.</li> <li><strong>Dataset Quality</strong> - develop methodologies and analytics to measure the quality and performance of our dataset and ML models.</li> <li><strong>Research Reviews</strong> - stay on top of academic research and industry best practices related to robotics learning and training.</li> <li><strong>Cross-Functional Collaboration</strong> - Work closely with robotics leadership, data ops, QA, and other engineering teams to ensure alignment from concept to deployment.</li> <li><strong>Mentorship & Influence</strong> - Guide mid and senior-level engineers through code reviews, pair programming, and architectural discussions, raising the technical bar across the organization.</li> </ul> <p><strong>For CA based applicants:</strong></p> <ul> <li>The base salary for this position is $240,000 - $260,000</li> &l ... (truncated, view full listing at source)