Robotics and AI Recruiter

About the role

Destro AI is building the intelligence layer for robotics — the system that coordinates robots, humans, and workflows 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. Destro is backed by investors who have previously invested in and built companies like Brex, Figma, Notion, and Instacart. Destro's MothershipOS is a shared brain across all robots, unlocking complex factory and warehouse workflows. 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 deploying in production with large enterprise operators.

We're hiring a Founding Recruiter to build and run Destro's talent engine. This is one of the first ten hires at the company, and you will own hiring end-to-end as we scale from a small founding team to 20 to 30 new hires a year, most of them engineers. You will be hands-on, sourcing, closing, and building the process as you go, with direct access to the founders and no existing playbook to inherit. Recruiting here is not a service function. You will have a seat at the table, shape how we hire, and be expected to speak up. Most of your time goes to recruiting and headhunting. The rest goes to supporting the business side: keeping our hiring and people tools running, handling basic HR operations, and helping the sales team with outreach and pipeline tracking.

Responsibilities

• Own full-cycle recruiting for engineering and technical roles, including robotics, software, systems, and field deployment engineers.
• Be a hunter: proactively identify and engage top talent across robotics, ML, systems, and infrastructure, rather than waiting for applicants.
• Build talent heatmaps of the companies, labs, and teams where the best robotics engineers sit, and use them to guide sourcing strategy.
• Source and close passive candidates through LinkedIn, GitHub, research networks, university labs, and referrals.
• Build long-term relationships with candidates who are not ready to move today, so they are warm when the right role opens.
• Partner with founders and hiring managers to define role scope, tradeoffs, and urgency before a search begins.
• Design interview processes tailored to each role and talent market, and run structured interviewer calibration so evaluation stays consistent.
• Act as the expert on compensation and competitive positioning, advising the founders on what it takes to close and what we may be missing.
• Design bespoke closing strategies and tell the Destro story with clarity and conviction, so candidates leave informed and energized.
• Treat every candidate with care and respect, including those we reject, because how they feel afterward reflects on us.
• Manage offers, negotiations, and closing, working directly with the founders.
• Own and administer our hiring stack, including the ATS (Breezy), sourcing tools, scheduling, and reporting.
• Build repeatable systems: job description templates, outreach sequences, interview scorecards, and pipeline dashboards.
• Evaluate and adopt AI-powered recruiting tools and automation workflows that speed up sourcing, outreach, and scheduling.
• Track hiring metrics such as time-to-fill, pipeline conversion, and source effectiveness, and report on them regularly.
• Support onboarding logistics and basic HR operations for new hires in coordination with our payroll and HR tools.

Requirements

Who