Technical Partnerships 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.

Instawork’s on-demand labor marketplace is uniquely valuable for robotics and physical AI. We’re working with leading frontier labs to create the highest-quality, highest-diversity datasets for training robotics foundation models. Instawork Robotics is the human advantage in the robotics revolution.

The Instawork Robotics Tech Partnerships Lead will be responsible for all aspects of the relationship with our partners in the robotics space.

Who You Are:

• A mid-career leader, with at least 5 years of professional experience in partnerships, product management, strategy and planning, or account management, excluding internships.
• A technologist, who is equally comfortable discussing best practices with robotics researchers and negotiating timelines and deliverables with purchasing executives.
• A robotics geek who enjoys tracking the latest in VLA research and robot learning approaches, and wants to advance the frontier of physical AI.
• An communicator who will translate client needs into plans and requirements for Instawork, and who will compellingly articulate to partners the services and selling points that make us unique.
• A problem-solver who enjoys building new-to-world systems, taking projects from zero to one, and applying creativity and grit to create value for our robotics partners.

Nice-to-haves:

• Experience working in data ops or account management for large AI labs and/or robotics labs, or experience selling and servicing those labs
• Experience at an early-stage or mid-stage startup
• A strong network in the robotics industry
• Comfort building with AI tools like Cursor and Claude Code

What You'll Do:

• Partnership Account Management - Work closely with researchers and business leaders at leading robotics labs to understand and influence their robot training data strategies.
• Technology Strategy - Identify the unique direction of your partners’ research teams, and create and drive the technical requirements that tell IRL what we need to build to exceed their needs.
• Business development - Identify or create new opportunities for IRL to serve partners in robotics and physical AI by attending conferences, meet-ups, and other high-touch bus-dev opportunities.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration - Coordinate with robotics leadership, data ops, QA, and other engineering teams to ensure exceptional data and service quality.

For CA Based Applicants:

• The base salary for this position is $160k - $240k
• This position is eligible for equity in the form of stock options
• This position is eligible for Instawork benefits, including:
• A variety of medical, dental, and vision plans with coverage beginning on the date of hire
• Flexible paid time off
• At least 8 paid company holidays annually
• Phone stipend
• Commuter stipend
• Supplemental pay on qualified leaves
• Employee health savings accounts (HSA) contribution
• Flexible spending plans
• 401K plan
• Perkspot - discount program through Lumity

#LI-Onsite

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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