Partnership 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.
Partnerships Lead - Instawork Robotics Labs || Bengaluru, India (Extensive Travel) · Field & Growth Operations
About IRL
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.
Instawork is building the data engine for the future of physical AI. To do that at scale, we need reliable, high-volume access to businesses across India whose skilled manual work becomes the training data for the next generation of robotics.
We are looking for a Partnerships Lead to secure that access - both by hunting new opportunities directly and by brokering relationships with the people who already control access to hundreds of businesses: association presidents, lenders, government officials, and enterprise leaders. Your job is to convert both cold outreach and high-trust institutional relationships into onboarding pathways at scale.
What You'll Do
- Broker access at scale. Identify, cultivate, and close relationships with high-leverage intermediaries - presidents of business associations, lenders, banks, politicians, civil servants, and large multinational corporations - who can grant direct, reliable access to hundreds of businesses.
- Build outbound pipeline. Generate leads and open doors through cold calls, email, and LinkedIn - full-cycle, from first outreach to signed partner to collected data.
- Turn one relationship into many. Convert a single institutional connection into structured, repeatable onboarding pathways for entire clusters of businesses.
- Be the trusted liaison. Serve as the ongoing point of contact between Instawork Robotics and partners, managing these relationships over time rather than transacting once.
- Navigate complex stakeholders. Move fluently across political, institutional, and commercial decision-makers to secure top-level buy-in and remove friction.
- Hand off to the field. Work closely with field operations so unlocked networks translate into collected, high-quality data on the ground.
Must-Have Criteria
4-5 Years of B2B Sales Experience: Proven track record in driving business revenue specifically within the SME market.
Team Leadership: Direct experience managing, mentoring, and driving performance across a sales team.
Pan-India Exposure & Mobility: Open and willing to undertake extensive travel across Pan-India to manage widespread partner relationships.
Multilingual Proficiency: Strong communication skills with fluency in Hindi along with at least two South Indian languages (e.g., Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam).
End-to-End Partnership Management: Ability to independently handle large-scale partner ecosystems and drive business growth across national territories.
Good-To-Have Criteria
Background in political consulting, public affairs, or government-facing roles.
Prior experience as a liaison officer within telecom, banking, or other highly regulated enterprises.
Proven track record as a business acquisition or partnerships lead at an e-commerce platform or B2B marketplace.
Experience as a Large B2B Key Account Manager dealing with institutional clients or public sector accounts.
Strong existing network and strategic contact base across relevant industry sectors.
What Sets You Apart
- A demonstrable, activatable network among the gatekeepers above
- A founder mindset and bias for action - you don't wait for leads, you create them
- Comfort operating with senior political, institutional, and corporate stakeholders
- A track record of turning relationships into concrete access and outcomes
- Deep fluency in navigating India's institutional and commercial ecosystems
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.