Staff Software Engineer, Physical AI Orchestration

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

Job summary

Destro AI is hiring its most senior engineering role to date - a Staff Software Engineer who will define how the company builds, ships, and scales software over the next several years. The role begins as a hands-on IC, with growth into a leadership position as the team scales.

You will consolidate existing services into a production-grade platform that runs across multiple customer sites, and establish version control, release, and deployment disciplines to support it.

Qualifications

• 8+ years building software, with robotics experience
• Shipped software that ran on real robots at real scale
• Led or mentored engineers, with potential to grow into leadership
• Consolidated fragmented services into a unified platform on live systems
• Implemented engineering processes and best practices across teams

Responsibilities

• Unify today’s separate services into one platform with clear boundaries
• Design for multi-site, multi-tenant robot fleets
• Own the technical roadmap and incremental hardening without downtime
• Establish real version control, release, and deployment discipline
• Ensure production readiness with automated tests, telemetry, and incident management
• Lead engineering best practices and mentor the team

Skills

Python

C++

Go

Rust

ROS/ROS2

Distributed systems

Git at scale

CI/CD

Containerization

Tools

Git at scale

Docker

Kubernetes

CI/CD tooling

IaC

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.

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

Role Overview

Destro AI is hiring its most senior engineering role to date - a Staff Software Engineer who will define how the company builds, ships, and scales software over the next several years.

The company reached production quickly. Its current platform consists of several services, each built independently and under deadline pressure to win early customer pilots. These services work in production today, but were not designed as a unified system: there is no shared architecture, no consistent versioning or release process, no automated deployment pipeline, limited test coverage, and insufficient telemetry to detect site degradation before customers notice it.

This role is responsible for consolidating these services into a single, coherent, production-grade platform that scales across multiple customer sites, and for establishing the version control, release, and deployment discipline required to support it. The approach is incremental - hardening and unifying the existing system in a deliberate sequence, not a rewrite, since the platform runs live customer operations that cannot be interrupted.

The role begins as a hands-on, individual-contributor position, with the expectation of growing into a leadership role as the engineering team scales.

What You’ll Do

• 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