Finance Associate

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 Robotics Lab (IRL)

Robots are getting smarter, but they still can’t reliably do the everyday physical tasks people do - chopping vegetables, stocking shelves, assembling parts. The bottleneck is data. UC Berkeley’s Prof. Ken Goldberg calls it the “100,000-year data gap”: the chasm between the massive text datasets used to train language models and the tiny amount of real-world, physical-dexterity data available to train robots. The entire robotics industry collected only ~100,000 hours of training data in 2024 and ~1 million in 2025 - and even the ~20 million hours projected for 2026 is still less than 0.04% of what is ultimately needed. IRL exists to close that gap. Using Instacore - a wearable multi-camera and sensor system (head, chest, and wrist cameras plus IMUs and a compute pack) - our field teams capture

synchronized, high-diversity egocentric data of real people doing real tasks across real commercial environments: kitchens, warehouses, hotels, retail, and light manufacturing. That data is quality-checked, anonymized, and delivered to the world’s leading robotics companies and foundation-model labs to teach robots how to operate in the messy physical world. In India, we run the on-ground engine of this mission - a growing fleet of Instacore rigs, Field Officers and Data Collectors, regional hubs, and the operations and finance backbone that keeps it all running at quality and scale.

Role Overview

The Finance Associate keeps the books clean and accurate for a high-volume, fast-scaling operation. You will own the day-to-day bookkeeping and reconciliation across our two largest payment streams - payments to partner businesses (where we record) and payments to Data Collectors / Field Officers - plus vendor and operational expenses. This is a numbers-heavy, detail-critical role: thousands of small payments every week that must all reconcile to the rupee.

Key Responsibilities

1. Bookkeeping & Data Entry - Record daily transactions accurately in the accounting system and Google Sheets; maintain clean, up-to-date ledgers.

2. Data Collector / Field Officer Payouts - Compute and process payouts based on verified hours/tasks; reconcile claimed vs. approved amounts; investigate and resolve discrepancies

before payment.

3. Business Payments - Process payments and incentives to partner businesses; track them against agreed terms.

4. Reconciliation - Run daily/weekly reconciliation across bank statements, payment records, and trackers; chase and close every mismatch; leave no unexplained gap.

5. Large-Dataset Handling - Work with big transaction datasets spanning multiple cities; use Excel/Google Sheets (SUMIFS, VLOOKUP/XLOOKUP, pivot tables) to clean, match, and summarize at volume.

6. Reporting & MIS - Prepare payout summaries, expense reports, and simple dashboards for the Finance lead.

7. Documentation & Compliance - Maintain invoices, proofs, and audit-ready records; support audits; apply basic GST/TDS handling as required.

8. Coordination - Work with Ops, Inventory, and city teams to validate hours/attendance before payouts go out.

Skills & Requirements

Mandatory

• 0-3 years in bookkeeping, accounts, or finance operations
• Comfort working with large datasets; strong Excel / Google Sheets (lookups, SUMIFS, pivot tables)
• High accuracy and attention to detail; comfortable with high transaction volumes
• Basic accounting knowledge (ledgers, reconciliation); B.Com / M.Com or equivalent
• Integrity and discipline when handling money and records

Preferred

• Exposure to Tally / Zoho Books / QuickBooks or similar
• Experience with payroll, vendor payments, or marketplace/gig payouts
• Basic working knowledge of GST and TDS

Personal Qualities

Detail-obsessed · Organized · Honest · Calm under high volume · Dependable and deadline- driven

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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