Training Team Lead: Field Operations

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.

Role Type: Full-time people leadership role

Team: Instawork Robotics Lab (IRL)

Reports To: Field Operations Manager / Head of Field Operations

Manages: A team of Trainers / Junior Trainers deployed across cities

Location: Bengaluru (base) + extensive multi-city field travel

Experience: 3–6 years, including hands-on training and team management

Travel: Extensive travel across India is mandatory

Working Hours: 6 days/week | project-dependent hours

About Us: Please Read First

Candidates often get this wrong, so to be completely clear:

• Instawork is a global, AI-powered labor marketplace: It connects over 10 million skilled workers ("Pros") with businesses. This is the parent company.
• Instawork Robotics Lab (IRL) is the robotics and physical AI team at Instawork: This is the specific group you will join.
• Instacore is the wearable camera and sensor rig used by field teams: It is hardware we operate, not our company identity.

What Instawork Robotics Lab (IRL) does

Robots are getting smarter, but they still struggle with everyday physical work like chopping vegetables, stocking shelves, or assembling parts. The core problem is a lack of real-world data. UC Berkeley Prof. Ken Goldberg calls this the "100,000-year data gap." The industry gathered roughly 100,000 hours of robot-training data in 2024 and around 1 million in 2025. Even the projected 20 million hours in 2026 represents less than 0.04% of what is needed.

IRL exists to fix this problem. Using Instacore, our field teams record synchronized, varied video and sensor data of people working in real commercial spaces, such as kitchens, warehouses, hotels, retail, and light manufacturing. We quality-check, anonymize, and deliver this data to leading robotics and AI labs. In India, we run the field operations powering this work. Field Operators handle the data capture, and our delivery quality depends directly on their training. This role leads that training program and the team running it.

Role Overview

We are hiring a Training Team Lead to run the training function for our Field Operators (FOs) and manage a distributed team of trainers across multiple cities. Rather than running isolated training sessions yourself, you will be responsible for overall training quality, consistency, and results nationwide.

In this role, you will define the curriculum and certification standards, hire and coach junior trainers, assign trainers to cities, step in for critical sessions, and ensure every Field Operator represents IRL professionally on site. You will also review operational performance metrics directly to verify that training programs produce real results.

Who You’ll Lead and Who You’ll Train (Know Your Audience)

The trainers who report to you

• A team of Trainers and Junior Trainers whom you will hire, onboard, certify, deploy across cities, coach, and manage to a shared standard.
• Your main goal is to maintain the same high standard of training quality, content, and professionalism across all locations.

The Field Operators they (and you) ultimately train

• Frontline field staff with diverse educational backgrounds and varying comfort levels with smartphones and technical tools.
• Trainees learn through practical, hands-on experience in real working environments rather than lectures.
• Training must take people from ZERO to field-ready. It must be simple, visual, hands-on, and in the local language, and it cannot assume any prior technical knowledge.
• Success is measured by how well trainees work independently in the field, not by training session attendance alone.

Key Responsibilities

1. Own the Training Function

• Manage the full Field Operator training lifecycle nationally, including onboarding, practical training, field practice, evaluations, certification, and ongoing skill updates.
• Build and continuously improve a standardized curriculum, SOPs, talking points, assessments, and certification criteria so every city trains the same way to the same bar.
• Set and defend the certification bar, even when there is pressure to push more people to the field faster.
• Localize content (language, examples, environment types) without diluting the standard.

2. Build, Lead and Deploy the Trainer Team

• Hire, onboard, and train junior trainers through a structured train-the-trainer program before assigning them to lead batches.
• Plan and manage trainer deployment: decide who trains in which city and when, matched to batch sizes, geographies, languages, and ramp plans.
• Coach, observe, and quality-check your trainers’ delivery in person; give feedback, manage performance, and keep delivery consistent across locations.
• Manage schedules, workload, and coverage across a travelling team, and step in to run the most difficult or highest-stakes batches yourself.

3. On-the-Job Training, Etiquette and Brand Representation

• Run practical training sessions (including shadowing, initial supervised recordings, and on-site feedback) to prepare operators for real working conditions.
• Own etiquette, conduct, and professionalism training: how FOs behave inside a client’s business, how they speak to owners, staff, and customers, grooming and dress, punctuality, consent and privacy, and safe, respectful handling of the environment.
• Ensure every Field Operator represents Instawork Robotics Lab professionally. Maintaining positive access to client sites depends on our teams operating quietly and respectfully.
• Train FOs on correct rig handling, wearing and alignment, recording SOPs, app usage, device and SD-card care, and basic troubleshooting of common hardware issues.

4. Assessment, Certification and Quality

• Standardize knowledge quizzes and practical assessments; make sure every trainer evaluates against the same objective criteria.
• Hold final accountability for Select / Reject and certification decisions, and audit a sample of your team’s calls for consistency.
• Certify only FOs who meet the standard; put clear corrective coaching or re-training paths in place for those who don’t.
• Support newly certified FOs through their first deployment where it de-risks quality.

5. Data, Reporting and Continuous Improvement

• Draw conclusions from raw data yourself — in Excel / Google Sheets — using attendance, assessment scores, trainer-wise outcomes, and post-deployment field-quality numbers to see what and who is failing, and why.
• Note: You will analyze raw operational spreadsheets directly rather than relying on pre-built LMS reporting dashboards.
• Track trainer performance and training effectiveness as hard metrics, not impressions, and use them to improve content, coaching, and deployment.
• Report training progress, certification quality, and field-readiness to leadership, and flag recurring field errors that trace back to training gaps.

6. Cross-functional Partnership

• Work closely with Field Operations (Managers, Internal Coordinators), Inventory/Hardware, and QA so training reflects real field conditions and current SOPs, and so recurring field or quality issues loop back into training.

Required Skills & Attributes

• Team Leadership: People leadership and the ability to build, coach, and hold a travelling team to a consistent standard.
• Training Depth: Hands-on experience training beginners, plus the ability to train and certify other trainers (train-the-trainer).
• Communication: Strong verbal communication in multiple Indian languages; able to explain clearly to individuals and groups and to coach adults.
• Curriculum & Standards: Can build and standardize curriculum, SOPs, and assessments from scratch and keep them current.
• Etiquette & Presence: Models and enforces professional on-site conduct and brand representation.
• Data Literacy: Able to analyze raw data in Excel or Google Sheets without relying on automated reporting systems.
• Decisiveness: Comfortable making and standing behind firm pass/fail, Select/Reject, and performance calls on objective criteria.
• Process Discipline: Strong attention to detail and willingness to enforce SOPs exactly, and to make others do the same.
• Travel Readiness: Willingness to travel extensively across India is mandatory; comfortable leading a team that is frequently on the road.
• Accountability: Owns training quality, trainer performance, FO field-readiness, certification integrity, and documentation.

Experience & Qualifications

• 3–6 years in training, field operations, technical operations, customer experience, or a similar function, including direct experience training people hands-on.
• Demonstrated experience managing or leading a team, or running train-the-trainer / multi-location training.
• Strong communication and interpersonal skills; confident managing groups and coaching individuals.
• Experience with technical equipment, hardware, robotics, data collection, or field operations is a strong plus.
• Proficient in Excel or Google Sheets (using formulas, filters, sorting, and pivot tables) to evaluate team and program performance.

Who This Role Is For

• People who want to own a function and build a team, not just run their own sessions.
• People who genuinely enjoy coaching beginners AND developing other trainers.
• People comfortable travelling extensively and leading a team that is often on the road.
• People who hold a quality bar under pressure and make difficult Select/Reject and performance calls.
• People who care about professionalism and how the team represents the company on the ground.
• People comfortable digging into raw numbers to prove whether training worked.

Who This Role Is NOT For

• People who want a fixed-location, desk-based role.
• People unwilling to travel extensively or to lead a travelling team.
• People who want to train in their own style and avoid standardization or being measured.
• People uncomfortable managing, coaching, or holding other trainers accountable.
• People who rely entirely on a system to tell them how trainees or trainers performed and can’t interpret raw data themselves.
• People who view professional conduct and etiquette as secondary to technical training.

Success Metrics

• Field-Readiness: FOs across all cities demonstrate the required knowledge and practical competency after training. The speed of iterating and training matters as well
• Consistency: Training quality and the certification bar are consistent across every trainer and every city.
• Trainer Performance: The trainer team delivers to standard, improves over time, and is deployed efficiently against demand.
• Etiquette & Brand: FOs represent IRL professionally on site; conduct-related issues and business friction stay low.
• Certification Integrity: Only FOs meeting the standard are certified; field errors and losses attributable to training trend down.
• Data-Driven Improvement: Uses raw performance data to find training gaps and drive measurable improvement.

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.

Personnel Privacy Policy