{"id":2973513,"url":"https://alion.io/job/destro-ai-founding-robotics-engineer-perception-vla","title":"Founding Robotics Engineer, Perception & VLA","company":{"id":723184,"name":"Destro AI","domain":"destro.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/destro-ai","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Breezy","truth_index":null},"role":"Robotics","role_family":"Robotics","seniority":"middle","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Brooklyn, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":105000,"max_usd":200000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":98},"experience_years_min":3,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"Computer Vision","optional":false},{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":false},{"name":"Isaac Sim","optional":false},{"name":"Localization","optional":false},{"name":"MuJoCo","optional":false},{"name":"Post-training","optional":false},{"name":"Pre-training","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Synthetic Data","optional":false},{"name":"Teleoperation","optional":false},{"name":"Vision-Language-Action","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-21T02:06:46Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-22","last_verified_at":"2026-10-24T15:34:13Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":3,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":3},"description":"Location: New York / New Jersey\nOffice: Customer floor\nType: Full-time, founding role\nCompensation: Base + equity\nTravel: Significant, travel-heavy\nWalk into any busy distribution center and you'll see the problem we're solving. Thousands of products, packaging that changes every season, light that shifts every time a dock door opens. Most picking and case handling is still done by hand, because robots haven't been able to make sense of a scene like that and act on it reliably.\nWe're hiring the engineer who will lead how our robots see and learn. You'll own perception and robot learning for VisionOS, make the core technical calls, and take our models from simulation onto real robots on customer floors.\nAbout Destro AI\nDestro is building the intelligence layer for robotics. MothershipOS coordinates robots, people, and workflows across an entire operation in real time, and it's already running inside large enterprise operations. VisionOS brings that intelligence to the individual robot: perceiving what's in front of it, deciding what to do, and handling it. Our founders previously led teams at HAI Robotics, Dexterity, and Matic, and we closed our Seed round at one of the highest valuations for a robotics company at this stage.\nAbout the Role\nThis is a founding role, and you'll build this part of the product from the ground up with the founding team. There isn't a large existing codebase waiting for you. The perception team recently lost a member, and we need someone who wants to build the next version from scratch, set the technical approach, and operate with a high degree of independence.\nYour work runs through the full model lifecycle: perception pipelines, VLA models, pre-training, fine-tuning, deployment, and post-training optimization all the way to inference. For us, a model is done when it works on the floor, not when the eval curve looks good.\nWhy You'll Want This Job\nYou set the direction. You'll own the perception and learning stack and decide how we improve and build it.\nYour work goes live fast. Our customers' warehouses are our lab, so your models get tested in real operations in months, not years.\nStartup speed. Small team, fast decisions. If you can make the case for something, you can start building it that week.\nYou grow as we grow. Your scope expands with every new task, robot, and customer, alongside founders who have scaled robotics before.\nFounding equity and a real stake in where the company goes.\nWhat You'll Own\n Perception: 3D scene understanding (RGB-D fusion, point clouds, segmentation), 6-DOF pose estimation for products and cases, and zero-shot identification with vision-language models.\nVLA models: Vision-language-action models as the backbone of how our robots carry out tasks, including pre-training, fine-tuning, and synthetic data in simulation.\nDeployment: Models running on real robots within tight latency and compute limits, plus an active learning loop that turns floor mistakes into better models.\nData and teleoperation: Teleoperation setup, data collection, and the pipeline from raw recordings to clean, versioned training data.\nYour First Month\nGet to know our robots, simulation environment, and customer floors, then write the perception and learning plan you want to bet on. By the end of the month, you'll have a first model running on a physical robot doing a real task.\nWhat You Bring\n3 to 5 years of hands-on work in robotics, computer vision, or ML, ideally on physical robots\nHands-on model training on GPUs and experience shipping models to production inference under latency constraints\n3D perception experience with point clouds and depth cameras\nExperience deploying on real robot hardware and working in simulation (MuJoCo, Isaac Sim, or similar)\nStrong Python and C++ (or a similar systems language)\nA habit of getting physical prototypes working in weeks, not months\nNice to Have\nVLA or manipulation policy training\nZero-shot pose estimation or segmentation\nGrasp planning, learned or geometric\nWarehouse or logistics automation experience\nTravel\nThis role is travel-heavy. Our customer warehouses are our lab, so expect to spend a significant amount of your time on site, deploying and improving systems on live floors. If you need to be home most weeks, this probably isn't the right fit, and we'd rather say so now.","description_format":"text","description_chars":4323,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":3,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Logistics & Warehouse Robotics","Robotic Software & Control Systems"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-21T03:36:58Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 3","filings_12m":3,"filings_prev_12m":0,"green_card_filings_12m":0,"median_offered_wage_usd":102500,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-15T11:24:14+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)"],"filings_for_role_12m":3}],"liveness":{"score":86,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.86,"p_room":1,"age_days":3,"expected_fill_days":31,"reasons":["conf:3","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-10-24T06:02:35Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/destro-ai-founding-robotics-engineer-perception-vla","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/destro-ai-founding-robotics-engineer-perception-vla.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-24T16:10:58Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":23311,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-25T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":723184},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=723184"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fdestro-ai-founding-robotics-engineer-perception-vla"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fdestro-ai-founding-robotics-engineer-perception-vla"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fdestro-ai-founding-robotics-engineer-perception-vla"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/destro-ai-founding-robotics-engineer-perception-vla\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fdestro-ai-founding-robotics-engineer-perception-vla"}]}