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.
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.