Finance Associate

Instawork Robotics Lab (IRL)

Robots are getting smarter, but they still can’t reliably do the everyday physical tasks people do — chopping vegetables, stocking shelves, assembling parts. The bottleneck is data. UC Berkeley’s Prof. Ken Goldberg calls it the “100,000-year data gap”: the chasm between the massive text datasets used to train language models and the tiny amount of real-world, physical-dexterity data available to train robots. The entire robotics industry collected only ~100,000 hours of training data in 2024 and ~1 million in 2025 — and even the ~20 million hours projected for 2026 is still less than 0.04% of what is ultimately needed. IRL exists to close that gap. Using Instacore — a wearable multi-camera and sensor system (head, chest, and wrist cameras plus IMUs and a compute pack) — our field teams capture
synchronized, high-diversity egocentric data of real people doing real tasks across real commercial environments: kitchens, warehouses, hotels, retail, and light manufacturing. That data is quality-checked, anonymized, and delivered to the world’s leading robotics companies and foundation-model labs to teach robots how to operate in the messy physical world. In India, we run the on-ground engine of this mission — a growing fleet of Instacore rigs, Field Officers and Data Collectors, regional hubs, and the operations and finance backbone that keeps it all running at quality and scale.

Role Overview

The Finance Associate keeps the books clean and accurate for a high-volume, fast-scaling operation. You will own the day-to-day bookkeeping and reconciliation across our two largest payment streams — payments to partner businesses (where we record) and payments to Data Collectors / Field Officers — plus vendor and operational expenses. This is a numbers-heavy, detail-critical role: thousands of small payments every week that must all reconcile to the rupee.

Key Responsibilities

1. Bookkeeping & Data Entry — Record daily transactions accurately in the accounting system and Google Sheets; maintain clean, up-to-date ledgers.
2. Data Collector / Field Officer Payouts — Compute and process payouts based on verified hours/tasks; reconcile claimed vs. approved amounts; investigate and resolve discrepancies
before payment.
3. Business Payments — Process payments and incentives to partner businesses; track them against agreed terms.
4. Reconciliation — Run daily/weekly reconciliation across bank statements, payment records, and trackers; chase and close every mismatch; leave no unexplained gap.
5. Large-Dataset Handling — Work with big transaction datasets spanning multiple cities; use Excel/Google Sheets (SUMIFS, VLOOKUP/XLOOKUP, pivot tables) to clean, match, and summarize at volume.
6. Reporting & MIS — Prepare payout summaries, expense reports, and simple dashboards for the Finance lead.
7. Documentation & Compliance — Maintain invoices, proofs, and audit-ready records; support audits; apply basic GST/TDS handling as required.
8. Coordination — Work with Ops, Inventory, and city teams to validate hours/attendance before payouts go out.

Skills & Requirements

Mandatory

• 0–3 years in bookkeeping, accounts, or finance operations
• Comfort working with large datasets; strong Excel / Google Sheets (lookups, SUMIFS, pivot tables)
• High accuracy and attention to detail; comfortable with high transaction volumes
• Basic accounting knowledge (ledgers, reconciliation); B.Com / M.Com or equivalent
• Integrity and discipline when handling money and records

Preferred

• Exposure to Tally / Zoho Books / QuickBooks or similar
• Experience with payroll, vendor payments, or marketplace/gig payouts
• Basic working knowledge of GST and TDS

Personal Qualities
Detail-obsessed · Organized · Honest · Calm under high volume · Dependable and deadline- driven