Head of Quality Assurance - 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.
Location: Bangalore
Experience: 10+ years
Industry: Automotive / Mobility / Robotics / Manufacturing
About the Role
Instawork Robotics creates the highest-quality, highest-diversity datasets for robotics and physical AI. We work with many of the most important robotics builders and research labs to solve the most important challenge in robotics - closing the data gap.
We are looking for a Head of QA with 10+ years of experience in automotive, manufacturing, mobility, robotics, or a closely related industry. This person will own the end-to-end quality and data-labeling function across Quality Assurance, Quality Control, Visual Inspection, and process quality.
This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who can build quality systems from the ground up, establish rigorous processes, lead teams, and drive a strong quality culture across operations and engineering.
What You'll Do
- Own the QA/QC function: Build and lead the overall quality strategy, processes, standards, and KPIs across operations and manufacturing.
- Visual & Product Quality: Establish robust visual inspection and defect detection processes, including inspection standards, sampling methodologies, defect classification, and root-cause analysis.
- Quality Systems: Design and implement SOPs, inspection protocols, quality gates, audit mechanisms, CAPA, and continuous improvement processes.
- Team Leadership: Build, manage, and develop high-performing QA/QC teams across locations and functions.
- Cross-functional Quality: Partner closely with Engineering, Operations, Manufacturing, Supply Chain, and Product teams to identify and eliminate recurring quality issues.
- Data & Metrics: Build quality dashboards and drive metrics such as defect rates, first-pass yield, rework, rejection rates, customer complaints, and quality escapes.
- Supplier & Process Quality: Drive supplier quality, incoming inspection, in-process quality, and final inspection standards.
- Root Cause & Continuous Improvement: Lead RCA, corrective/preventive actions, and quality improvement initiatives using structured methodologies such as 8D, FMEA, SPC, Six Sigma, or similar frameworks.
What We're Looking For
- 10+ years of experience in QA/QC, preferably in the automotive, manufacturing, robotics, mobility, electronics, or hardware industry.
- Strong experience setting up and scaling multi-layer quality functions and processes from the ground up.
- Experience leading QA and data-labeling operations for Petabyte-scale pipelines of real-world data
- Experience working closely with machine learning, computer vision, robotics, or AI researchers on high-quality AI training datasets.
- Experience managing large or distributed QA/QC teams.
- Strong knowledge of root-cause analysis, CAPA, FMEA, 8D, SPC, and quality management systems.
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with a data-driven approach to quality.
- Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills.
- A hands-on, high-ownership mindset - someone who is comfortable being on the floor, solving problems, and building processes rather than just managing them.
Good to Have
- Experience with automotive quality standards such as IATF 16949.
- Exposure to computer vision, automated inspection, AI-based visual QA, or robotics.
- Experience in a fast-scaling startup or high-growth manufacturing environment.
- Six Sigma / Quality certification.
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.