Staff Software Engineer, Physical AI Orchestration
Senior hands-on IC role at a seed-stage robotics-AI startup: consolidating fragmented orchestration services into one production-grade platform (MothershipOS) that coordinates robots and humans across warehouse sites, while establishing version control, CI/CD, OTA updates, and observability. Core stack: Python, ROS/ROS2, distributed systems, cloud and edge compute.
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- New York, United States
- Work setup
- Not specified
- Seniority
- Staff
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 8+ years
- Category
- Software engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 8+ years building software, with a substantial portion at robotics companies (AMR/AGV, warehouse automation, manipulation, AVs, drones, or comparable fielded systems)
- Shipped software that ran on real robots in real customer environments at real scale
- Personally taken a system from pilot-grade to multi-site production
- Consolidated fragmented services into a unified platform on a live system without stopping delivery
- Introduced engineering process to a team that didn't have any and driven adoption
- Pragmatic about technical debt — sequencing fixes by risk
- Comfortable owning production, including on-call and live incidents
- Able to operate independently in ambiguous, fast-moving startup environments
- Strong communicator able to align engineers, deployment teams, and customers on a technical plan
- Wants to build and lead a team while staying close to the code
- High ownership mindset with strong bias for execution
- Deep Python and strong systems fundamentals
- ROS/ROS2 experience
- Direct experience with multi-vendor or heterogeneous robot fleets
- Fleet management, teleoperation, or robot observability tooling — used or built
- Distributed systems, message-based architectures, and failure modes of intermittently connected edge devices
- Git at scale — branching models, monorepo/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
Nice to have
- C++, Go, or Rust
- Prior integration work against WMS/WES platforms (Manhattan, Blue Yonder, Körber, SAP EWM) or with 3PL operators
Full description
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.
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 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