Partnerships Manager

Role: Partnerships Lead
Company: Instawork Robotics Labs
Location: Bengaluru, India
Work-mode: On-site (Extensive Travel)
Department: Field & Growth Operations
Budget: 18 - 20 LPA
Experience: 4+ years
About company:
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 IRL:
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, homes - to capture the high-fidelity task data that the world’s leading Robotics labs use to train their foundation models.
Instawork is building the data engine for the future of physical AI. To do that at scale, we need reliable, high-volume access to businesses across India whose skilled manual work becomes the training data for the next generation of robotics.
We are looking for a Partnerships Lead to secure that access — both by hunting new opportunities directly and by brokering relationships with the people who already control access to hundreds of businesses: association presidents, lenders, government officials, and enterprise leaders. Your job is to convert both cold outreach and high-trust institutional relationships into onboarding pathways at scale.
What You'll Do:
Broker access at scale. Identify, cultivate, and close relationships with high-leverage intermediaries — presidents of business associations, lenders, banks, politicians, civil servants, and large multinational corporations — who can grant direct, reliable access to hundreds of businesses.
Build outbound pipeline. Generate leads and open doors through cold calls, email, and LinkedIn — full-cycle, from first outreach to signed partner to collected data.
Turn one relationship into many. Convert a single institutional connection into structured, repeatable onboarding pathways for entire clusters of businesses.
Be the trusted liaison. Serve as the ongoing point of contact between Instawork Robotics and partners, managing these relationships over time rather than transacting once.
Navigate complex stakeholders. Move fluently across political, institutional, and commercial decision-makers to secure top-level buy-in and remove friction.
Hand off to the field. Work closely with field operations so unlocked networks translate into collected, high-quality data on the ground.
Must-Have Criteria:
4–5 Years of B2B Sales Experience: Proven track record in driving business revenue specifically within the SME market.
Team Leadership: Direct experience managing, mentoring, and driving performance across a sales team.
Pan-India Exposure & Mobility: Open and willing to undertake extensive travel across Pan-India to manage widespread partner relationships.
Multilingual Proficiency: Strong communication skills with fluency in Hindi along with at least two South Indian languages (e.g., Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam).
End-to-End Partnership Management: Ability to independently handle large-scale partner ecosystems and drive business growth across national territories.
Good-To-Have Criteria:
Background in political consulting, public affairs, or government-facing roles.
Prior experience as a liaison officer within telecom, banking, or other highly regulated enterprises.
Proven track record as a business acquisition or partnerships lead at an e-commerce platform or B2B marketplace.
Experience as a Large B2B Key Account Manager dealing with institutional clients or public sector accounts.
Strong existing network and strategic contact base across relevant industry sectors.
What Sets You Apart:
A demonstrable, activatable network among the gatekeepers above
A founder mindset and bias for action — you don't wait for leads, you create them
Comfort operating with senior political, institutional, and corporate stakeholders
A track record of turning relationships into concrete access and outcomes
Deep fluency in navigating India's institutional and commercial ecosystems

Work arrangement
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