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.

• 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.

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