Finance Associate – Payments 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.

Overview

We run large-scale field data collection programs that involve paying a high volume of data collectors on a daily basis. As the program scales, we are looking for a highly dependable early-career operator who can own the day-to-day payout process, ensure accuracy in reports, and coordinate closely with operations teams to make sure payments happen smoothly and on time.

Role Summary

This role sits at the intersection of finance and operations. The person will be responsible for managing daily payouts for a large distributed workforce, reconciling reports with internal teams, following up on payment issues, and ensuring collectors are paid accurately and on time. This role is ideal for someone early in their career who is detail-oriented, comfortable with repetitive high-volume work, and willing to stay on top of operational follow-through every single day.

Key Responsibilities

Payout Operations
-Manage daily payout processing for a large base of data collectors
-Ensure all payments are processed accurately and within timelines
-Track payout status and follow through until closure
Reconciliation & Reporting
-Match payout reports with operations data on a daily basis
-Identify mismatches, missing entries, and errors before payments are processed
-Maintain clean and accurate payout records
Cross-Team Coordination
-Work closely with operations teams to validate collector-level payment data
-Follow up internally to resolve discrepancies quickly
-Coordinate with relevant teams on exceptions, delays, and edge cases
Issue Resolution
-Handle payout-related queries and escalations from the field or internal teams
-Track unresolved payment issues and ensure they are closed
-Support smooth communication between operations and finance workflows
Process Discipline
-Maintain consistency and accuracy in a high-volume daily process
-Help improve payout workflows as scale increases
-Ensure basic controls and checks are followed without slowing down execution

Ideal Candidate Profile

0-6 months of experience in finance operations, payment operations, reconciliation, accounts support, payroll support, business operations, or similar execution-heavy roles
Comfortable handling high-volume repetitive work with accuracy
Strong follow-up skills and willingness to chase issues to closure
Good coordination skills across teams
Comfortable working with spreadsheets and structured reports
Reliable, disciplined, and able to manage daily operational grind

Nice to Have

Experience in payouts, payroll operations, vendor payments, incentives processing, or finance ops
Experience in fast-moving startups, BPOs, marketplaces, or operations-heavy environments
Exposure to high-volume payment workflows or reconciliation processes

What Success Looks Like

Daily payouts happen accurately and on time
Report mismatches are caught before payment processing
Issues are resolved quickly without payout delays
The payout process scales smoothly as the number of collectors grows

Our Values

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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