Video Platform Engineer

📋 Job Overview

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 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!

🎯 The Role

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.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Own the pipeline that turns raw video capture into training-ready data
• Handle video ingest, transcoding, time-synchronization, and quality checks
• Design robust orchestration that can handle rig failures mid-session
• Optimize the cost per captured hour of processing
• Work directly with data collection teams to shape the roadmap
• Automate video quality checks and indexing
• Deliver processed data to robotics labs

📌 Required Qualifications

• 5+ years building and operating production video or media processing systems at scale
• Hands-on, production experience with FFmpeg, GStreamer, or an equivalent media framework
• Fluency in codecs and containers: H.264/HEVC/AV1, MP4/fMP4, and the practical tradeoffs between them
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, object storage, and observability
• Strong programming and problem solving skills
• Experience with durable workflow orchestration (Temporal, Conductor, Step Functions, Airflow, or similar)
• Experience designing cost-efficient architectures for large media or data workloads
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, and production operations

⭐ Desirable Experience

• Multi-camera, multi-view, or time-synchronized capture systems, and the clock-drift and alignment problems that come with them
• Robotics or sensor data formats: MCAP, rosbag, ROS/ROS2, Parquet, or similar columnar and log formats
• Familiarity with machine learning on video or images. Classification, detection and tracking, segmentation, re-identification, super-resolution, quality scoring, auto-annotation, redaction
• Perceptual quality measurement (VMAF or equivalent) and encoding-ladder design
• Streaming and packaging formats: HLS, DASH, CMAF, and DRM integration
• Range across the stack. If you've built the annotation or review tooling on top of your own pipeline, we want to hear about it

🎁 Benefits

• Free snacks
• Health Insurance
• Personal Insurance
• Flexible Hours
• Maternity/Paternity Leave
• Broadband Reimbursement

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

• Visa sponsorship may be available