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Instawork Robotics Labs (IRL) is seeking an Associate Director of Operations to build and scale distributed, real-world operations from the ground up. IRL addresses the "100,000-year data gap" identified by UC Berkeley researchers—the gulf between what AI language models know and what physical robots must learn. The company deploys skilled workers into commercial and residential environments (kitchens, warehouses, hotel floors, homes) to capture high-fidelity task data that leading robotics labs use to train foundation models.
This is a hands-on builder role, not a dashboard-management position. You will own large, distributed operations across multiple locations and teams, defining the operating model, building processes, hiring teams, establishing metrics, and creating systems to scale. Key responsibilities include: building high-performing teams of exceptional operators and developing leaders; turning chaos into structure by identifying bottlenecks and building repeatable processes; being relentlessly execution-oriented—when something breaks, you get to the ground and solve it; operating at speed as priorities shift and unexpected problems arise; designing processes and teams that can handle 10x growth; and owning clear operational outcomes around performance, quality, productivity, and efficiency.
You should have significant experience building and running large, distributed, real-world operations in e-commerce, logistics, marketplaces, field operations, fast-scaling startups, or hardware-adjacent businesses. You've built teams and operating models from scratch, not just inherited established ones. You demonstrate extreme ownership ("I'll figure it out"), agility, and resilience. You're comfortable with incomplete information, make decisions quickly, and balance speed, quality, cost, and scale. You can walk into a messy operation, identify what needs to happen next, and spend mornings reviewing metrics and afternoons solving ground-level problems.
