Staff Software Engineer, Orchestration Platform

About Destro AIDestro 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 OverviewThis 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 & ArchitectureBring today's separate services into one coherent platform with clear service boundaries, shared data contracts, and consistent interfacesDesign for scale: multi-site, multi-tenant, and multi-vendor robot fleets from day oneEliminate duplicated logic, one-off scripts, and per-site special casesOwn the technical roadmap that takes us from the current architecture to the target one, incrementally and without downtimeVersion Control, Release & Update DeliveryEstablish real version control discipline: branching strategy, code review standards, semantic versioning, release branches, and change trackingBuild a repeatable, automated path from commit to running on customer hardwareImplement 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 4amGuarantee we always know exactly what version is running whereProduction Readiness & ReliabilityStand 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 floorBuild structured logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting across the deployed fleetHarden the integration surface with customer WMS, WES, and ERP systems — retries, idempotency, schema versioning, graceful degradation when their systems go downEstablish on-call, incident response, runbooks, and postmortem practiceOwn uptime, performance, and stability of the platform in productionEngineering LeadershipDefine and implement engineering best practices across the software organization — code review, documentation, testing standards, definition of doneLead cross-functionally with robotics, computer vision, deployment, and product to sequence work and resolve technical tradeoffsMentor the engineers already here and raise the bar on every hire after youGrow into leading the software team as we scale headcount over the next 12 months Who You Are8+ years building software, with a substantial portion of it at robotics companies — AMR/AGV, warehouse automation, manipulation, autonomous vehicles, drones, or comparable fielded robotic systemsYou have shipped software that ran on real robots, in real customer environments, at real scale — not in a lab or a research groupYou have personally taken a system from pilot-grade to multi-site production, and can walk through what broke and how you fixed itYou have consolidated fragmented services into a unified platform, on a live system, without stopping deliveryYou have introduced engineering process to a team that didn't have any, and gotten people to actually adopt itPragmatic about technical debt — you sequence fixes by risk, not by preferenceComfortable owning production, including on-call and live incidentsAble to operate independently in ambiguous, fast-moving startup environmentsStrong communicator who can align engineers, deployment teams, and customers on the same technical planWants to build and lead a team, but wants to stay close to the codeHigh ownership mindset with strong bias for execution Technical SkillsDeep Python; strong systems fundamentals. C++, Go, or Rust a plusROS/ROS2, and direct experience with multi-vendor or heterogeneous robot fleetsFleet management, teleoperation, or robot observability tooling — whether you used it or built itDistributed systems, message-based architectures, and the failure modes of intermittently connected edge devicesGit at scale — branching models, monorepo or multi-repo tradeoffs, release managementContainerization, infrastructure-as-code, and modern CI/CDOTA update systems and fleet device managementLinux/server environments, networking, cloud systems, and edge deploymentsPrior integration work against WMS/WES platforms (Manhattan, Blue Yonder, Körber, SAP EWM) or with 3PL operators is a plus