---
title: 'Video Platform Engineer - E3 at Instawork'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/video-platform-engineer-e3-instawork-bengaluru-b0azs0sn0mmb'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-16'
---

# Video Platform Engineer - E3 at Instawork

- **Company:** Instawork
- **Location:** Bengaluru, India
- **Posted:** 2026-09-16
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-16
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/instawork/jobs/4713756006

## Job description

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

Every dataset IRL ships starts as raw video: multi-camera rigs recording a worker palletizing a warehouse order, cooking a meal, or turning over a hotel room. Many hours of synchronized streams per session, plus the telemetry captured alongside them, growing into petabytes.

As a Video Platform Engineer, you'll own the pipeline that turns that raw capture into training-ready data: ingest, transcode, time-synchronization, automate video quality checks, indexing, and delivery to the robotics labs that train on it.

This is a hybrid media-engineering and distributed-systems role. You'll make codec and container decisions. You'll design orchestration that survives a rig failing mid-session. And you'll own the cost per captured hour of processing.

You'll help shape the roadmap by working directly with the data collection teams in the field, and you'll have real say in which of their problems we solve first.

## Who You Are

- 5+ years building and operating production video or media processing systems at scale.
- Hands-on, production experience with FFmpeg, GStreamer, or an equivalent media framework. You've built a pipeline around it and debugged it under load.
- Fluency in codecs and containers: H.264/HEVC/AV1, MP4/fMP4, and the practical tradeoffs between them.
- Strong understanding of distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, object storage, and observability.
- Strong programming and problem solving skills.
- Experience with durable workflow orchestration (Temporal, Conductor, Step Functions, Airflow, or similar).
- Experience designing cost-efficient architectures for large media or data workloads, and a working understanding of storage tiering, egress, capacity planning, and GPU utilization.
- Experience with Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, and production operations.

**Preferred**

- Multi-camera, multi-view, or time-synchronized capture systems, and the clock-drift and alignment problems that come with them.
- Robotics or sensor data formats: MCAP, rosbag, ROS/ROS2, Parquet, or similar columnar and log formats.
- Familiarity with machine learning on video or images. Classification, detection and tracking, segmentation, re-identification, super-resolution, quality scoring, auto-annotation, redaction.
- Perceptual quality measurement (VMAF or equivalent) and encoding-ladder design.
- Streaming and packaging formats: HLS, DASH, CMAF, and DRM integration.
- Range across the stack. If you've built the annotation or review tooling on top of your own pipeline, we want to hear about it.

## What You'll Do

- Design and build the ingest path from capture rigs to cloud storage, resilient to partial uploads, flaky field networks, and mid-session hardware failure.
- Build transcoding and normalization pipelines that turn heterogeneous rig output into consistent, analysis-ready media.
- Time-synchronize multi-camera video with telemetry and sensor streams into coherent, labeled episodes.
- Build automated quality checks that flag unusable sessions before they reach a customer - blur, exposure failure, dropped frames, etc.
- Design dataset versioning, lineage, and indexing so that any shipped episode can be traced back to its raw capture.
- Build the delivery path that gets datasets to robotics labs, including packaging, integrity verification, and access control.
- Own cost per captured hour and cost per delivered dataset: storage tiering and lifecycle, egress, encoding efficiency, and GPU utilization.
- Improve observability across the pipeline—monitoring, logging, tracing, and per-stage throughput and failure metrics.
- Troubleshoot complex issues spanning media tooling, storage, networking, and application code.
- Participate in an on-call rotation and own diagnosis and resolution of production issues.
- Participate in code reviews and raise the technical bar through clear, practical feedback.
- Own complex initiatives from problem definition through design, implementation, and operation.
- Measure and improve pipeline throughput, end-to-end latency from capture to delivery, dataset yield, reliability, incident recovery time, and infrastructure cost per workload.

## Perks

- Free snacks
- Health Insurance
- Personal Insurance
- Flexible Hours
- Maternity/Paternity Leave
- Broadband Reimbursement

## 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](https://www.instawork.com) 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](http://www.instawork.com/about).

[Personnel Privacy Policy](https://info.instawork.com/legal/california-personnel-privacy-policy)

## About Instawork

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Instawork is a leading AI-powered labor marketplace that connects businesses with vetted, skilled hourly workers for shifts, temp-to-hire, and full-time roles across North America, and is expanding into humanoid robotics training.
- **Entity Type**: Private (pre-IPO; Series D stage)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2015
- **Founders**: Sumir Meghani (CEO), Deep Abhani (CTO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Labor marketplace, flexible staffing, temporary staffing, AI-powered workforce management, robotics workforce training
- **Target customers**: B2B (businesses in hospitality, warehouse/logistics, manufacturing, retail, and light industrial sectors); also serves B2C (hourly workers seeking flexible shifts)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: "To create economic opportunities for local businesses and hourly workers across the globe" — empowering everyone to thrive in their careers.

## Products & Services
- **Instawork Platform (Core Marketplace)**: An AI-powered mobile app and web platform where businesses post shifts and workers browse and book them. Features background checks, skills verification, ratings, and automated payroll, taxes, and insurance. Fills 90% of jobs within 24 hours.
- **Instawork Robotics**: A new division that pays employees to help train humanoid robots, expanding Instawork’s labor marketplace into AI and robotics data generation and validation. Includes roles like Founding Machine Learning Lead, Field Engineering Technician, and Robotics AI Campus Lead.
- **Top Pro Program**: Rewards high-performing workers with access to more shifts and cash bonuses.
- **'Captains' Program**: Sends vetted on-site shift leaders to manage large groups of workers for businesses.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (pre-IPO private company); last known Series D valuation was not publicly reported.
- **Key Metric**: Over 7 million hourly workers in its network (source: [instawork.com/about](https://www.instawork.com/about)); over 40 markets across North America (expanding to 60+ cities); 2+ billion data signals optimizing worker/business connections; 90% of jobs filled within 24 hours.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Benchmark, Spark Capital, Craft Ventures, Greylock, Y Combinator (source: [Greenhouse jobs page](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/instawork)).
- **Growth Signals**: Launch of a dedicated Robotics division (2025-2026); active hiring for robotics, AI, and enterprise sales roles across multiple US and international hubs (San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Pittsburgh, Bengaluru, Vancouver, Monterrey, Austin, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Chapel Hill).

## Competitive Advantages
- **Network effects**: The largest platform connecting businesses to hourly workers (7M+ workers) creates a deep, defensible moat — more workers attract more businesses, and vice versa.
- **AI & data moat**: Billions of proprietary data signals (worker performance, fit, reliability) power a machine-learning engine that optimizes worker matching, increasing return rates and reducing churn.
- **Full-stack trust & safety**: Background checks, skills verification, worker ratings, on-shift insurance, and a dedicated Trust & Safety team lower risk for businesses.
- **50-state+ coverage**: Presence in 60+ metro areas across the US and Canada allows rapid scaling for multi-location enterprise clients.
- **New robotics pivot**: Leveraging its massive workforce to train humanoid robots creates a unique competitive position at the intersection of labor and AI infrastructure.

## Strategic Focus
- **Scaling the core marketplace**: Expanding into new geographies (60+ cities) and verticals (e.g., light industrial, retail).
- **Enterprise growth**: Building out enterprise account management and strategic account teams for large clients in logistics, manufacturing, and retail.
- **Robotics & AI expansion**: Developing a new business line around training humanoid robots, positioning Instawork as a key partner for robotics companies needing real-world data and validation.
- **Product innovation**: Using AI to improve worker fit, reliability, and return rates; investing in automation and operational efficiency.

## Why Work Here
- **Mission-driven impact**: "Your work at Instawork directly benefits thousands of businesses and millions of workers." The company emphasizes creating economic opportunities.
- **Rapid growth and strong investors**: Pre-IPO company backed by top-tier VCs (Benchmark, Spark, Greylock, Y Combinator) — offers potential for career growth and equity upside.
- **Rewarding problems**: Tackle challenging, high-velocity problems in AI, robotics, marketplace dynamics, and trust & safety.
- **Culture values** (from careers page): Bias for Action, Act Like an Owner, Always Be Learning, Empathy/Trust/Candor.
- **Benefits**: Medical/Dental/Vision insurance, 401K/PF contribution, FSA & Commuter Benefits, Flexible Time Off, Parental & Family Leave, Office & Phone Plan Reimbursement, Employee Referral Bonus, Catered Lunches, Pet Friendly Offices, Mental Health Benefits, Team Offsites.
- **Work model**: Hybrid / in-office hub locations in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Pittsburgh, and Bengaluru; also remote-friendly for certain roles.

## Sources
1. [Instawork Careers Page](https://www.instawork.com/careers)
2. [Instawork Greenhouse Jobs Board](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/instawork)
3. [Instawork About Page](https://www.instawork.com/about)
4. [Instawork Homepage](https://www.instawork.com/)
5. [Instawork How It Works](https://www.instawork.com/how-it-works)

## Other roles at Instawork

- [Platform Engineer - E3](https://feeny.ai/job/platform-engineer-e3-instawork-bengaluru-28pdcv0djnfz) — Bengaluru, India
- [People Ops Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/people-ops-manager-instawork-san-francisco-california-c4bx8as1cwn9) — San Francisco California, United States
- [Quality Check Intern - Hardware](https://feeny.ai/job/quality-check-intern-hardware-instawork-bengaluru-akrbqyks0nd3) — Bengaluru, India
- [Head of Partnerships - Instawork Robotics Labs](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-partnerships-instawork-robotics-labs-instawork-bengaluru-t6gcmzkhzzq7) — Bengaluru, India
- [Enterprise Account Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/enterprise-account-manager-instawork-dallas-texas-x3pbrmw6nrt0) — Dallas Texas, United States / Houston Texas, United States
- [Head of Operations - Instawork Robotics Labs](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-operations-instawork-robotics-labs-instawork-bengaluru-5193f95fz9sd) — Bengaluru, India
- [Associate Director - Operations - Instawork Robotics Labs](https://feeny.ai/job/associate-director-operations-instawork-robotics-labs-instawork-bengaluru-9dyj0ehgt1h6) — Bengaluru, India
- [Head of Quality Assurance - Instawork Robotics Labs](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-quality-assurance-instawork-robotics-labs-instawork-bengaluru-5vjp58hdrz00) — Bengaluru, India
- [Growth Marketing Manager, Discoverability](https://feeny.ai/job/growth-marketing-manager-discoverability-instawork-san-francisco-california-x5ry5wbztpe3) — San Francisco California, United States
- [Senior Mechanical Engineer - Robotics Hardware](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-mechanical-engineer-robotics-hardware-instawork-bengaluru-1y8fycnnt400) — Bengaluru, India