Staff Software Engineer, Orchestration Platform

Destro; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Destro AI in New York is seeking a senior software engineer to unify disparate robotic services into a single production-grade platform. You will shape architecture, own the release process, and lead the software team as we scale across sites and customers.

You will work hands-on while guiding engineering best practices, CI/CD, and observability. This role blends coding with leadership in a fast-moving robotics environment.

Qualifications

• 8+ years building software, with a substantial portion in robotics.
• Shipped software that ran on real robots, in real customer environments, at scale.
• Led systems from pilot to multi-site production and resolved breakages.
• Consolidated fragmented services into a unified platform without stopping delivery.
• Strong communicator and capable leader who can mentor a growing team.

Responsibilities

• Unify today's services into one platform with clear boundaries and data contracts.
• Design for scale: multi-site, multi-tenant, multi-vendor fleets from day one.
• Own the technical roadmap, version control, and release strategy with minimal downtime.
• Lead cross-functional collaboration across robotics, deployment, and product teams.
• Establish CI/CD, logging, metrics, tracing, and on-call practices across the fleet.

Skills

Python

C++

Go

Rust

ROS/ROS2

Distributed systems

Git at scale

CI/CD

OTA updates

Linux servers

Tools

Git

Docker

CI/CD

Kubernetes

Job description

Destro AI is building the intelligence layer for robotics — the system that tells robots and humans what to do across complex real-world operations.

Founded by former leaders from HAI Robotics, Dexterity, and Matic, Destro is built on a simple thesis: robotics has solved movement, but not decision-making.

At the core of Destro is MothershipOS — a centralized brain that coordinates robots, humans, and workflows in real time. Unlike traditional systems that rely on local intelligence on each robot, Destro brings global intelligence across the entire operation.

We recently closed our Seed round at one of the highest valuations for a robotics company at this stage, and are already working with large enterprise operators to deploy real systems in production environments.

Role Overview

About Destro AI

Destro AI is building the intelligence layer for robotics — the system that tells robots and humans what to do across complex real-world operations.

Founded by former leaders from HAI Robotics, Dexterity, and Matic, Destro is built on a simple thesis: robotics has solved movement, but not decision-making.

At the core of Destro is MothershipOS — a centralized brain that coordinates robots, humans, and workflows in real time. Unlike traditional systems that rely on local intelligence on each robot, Destro brings global intelligence across the entire operation.

We recently closed our Seed round at one of the highest valuations for a robotics company at this stage, and are already working with large enterprise operators to deploy real systems in production environments.

Role Overview

This is the most senior engineering hire we will make this year, and the person in it will shape how Destro builds software for the next several years.

We got to production fast. What exists today is a set of services that were built separately, under deadline, to win pilots — and they work, but they were never designed to be one system. There is no unified architecture across them, no consistent versioning or release discipline, no automated way to push an update to a customer site, thin test coverage, and not enough telemetry to know a site is degrading before the customer calls.

You are being hired to bring those services together into a single, coherent, production-grade platform that scales across sites — and to build the version control, release, and deployment discipline underneath it. Not through a rewrite; customers depend on this system every day. Through consolidation, hardening, and doing it in the right order.

You will start hands-on in the codebase. As the team grows, you will grow into leading it.

This role is ideal for someone who is equally comfortable:

• unifying disparate services into one architecture,
• building the CI, versioning, release, and observability layer from nothing,
• refactoring live code without breaking customers,
• working across engineering, deployment, and product to sequence the work,
• and leading and growing a software team.

We are specifically looking for engineers who have built and shipped inside robotics companies. This is not a domain you can pick up on the job here — the failure modes of a robot fleet running live in a warehouse are not the failure modes of a web platform, and we need someone who already knows the difference.

What You’ll DoPlatform Unification & Architecture

• Bring today's separate services into one coherent platform with clear service boundaries, shared data contracts, and consistent interfaces
• Design for scale: multi-site, multi-tenant, and multi-vendor robot fleets from day one
• Eliminate duplicated logic, one-off scripts, and per-site special cases
• Own the technical roadmap that takes us from the current architecture to the target one, incrementally and without downtime

Version Control, Release & Update Delivery

• Establish real version control discipline: branching strategy, code review standards, semantic versioning, release branches, and change tracking
• Build a repeatable, automated path from commit to running on customer hardware
• Implement over-the-air update push across cloud and on-site edge compute — staged rollouts, device provisioning, version pinning per site, and a rollback path that works at 4am
• Guarantee we always know exactly what version is running where

Production Readiness & Reliability

• Stand up CI and meaningful automated test coverage, including simulation and hardware-in-the-loop testing so changes can be validated without a robot on the floor
• Build structured logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting across the deployed fleet
• Harden the integration surface with customer WMS, WES, and ERP systems — retries, idempotency, schema versioning, graceful degradation when their systems go down
• Establish on-call, incident response, runbooks, and postmortem practice
• Own uptime, performance, and stability of the platform in production

Engineering Leadership

• Define and implement engineering best practices across the software organization — code review, documentation, testing standards, definition of done
• Lead cross-functionally with robotics, computer vision, deployment, and product to sequence work and resolve technical tradeoffs
• Mentor the engineers already here and raise the bar on every hire after you
• Grow into leading the software team as we scale headcount over the next 12 months

Who You Are

• 8+ years building software, with a substantial portion of it at robotics companies — AMR/AGV, warehouse automation, manipulation, autonomous vehicles, drones, or comparable fielded robotic systems
• You have shipped software that ran on real robots, in real customer environments, at real scale — not in a lab or a research group
• You have personally taken a system from pilot-grade to multi-site production, and can walk through what broke and how you fixed it
• You have consolidated fragmented services into a unified platform, on a live system, without stopping delivery
• You have introduced engineering process to a team that didn't have any, and gotten people to actually adopt it
• Pragmatic about technical debt — you sequence fixes by risk, not by preference
• Comfortable owning production, including on-call and live incidents
• Able to operate independently in ambiguous, fast-moving startup environments
• Strong communicator who can align engineers, deployment teams, and customers on the same technical plan
• Wants to build and lead a team, but wants to stay close to the code
• High ownership mindset with strong bias for execution

Technical Skills

• Deep Python; strong systems fundamentals. C++, Go, or Rust a plus
• ROS/ROS2, and direct experience with multi-vendor or heterogeneous robot fleets
• Fleet management, teleoperation, or robot observability tooling — whether you used it or built it
• Distributed systems, message-based architectures, and the failure modes of intermittently connected edge devices
• Git at scale — branching models, monorepo or multi-repo tradeoffs, release management
• Containerization, infrastructure-as-code, and modern CI/CD
• OTA update systems and fleet device management
• Linux/server environments, networking, cloud systems, and edge deployments
• Prior integration work against WMS/WES platforms (Manhattan, Blue Yonder, Körber, SAP EWM) or with 3PL operators is a plus