Software Engineer, Controls

Monumental is automating on-site construction with robotics and software. Our mission is to make construction primarily software-defined and work towards a future where beautiful, bespoke buildings are built within a single day with minimal labour.

We’re a small team of mostly engineers (coming from companies like Palantir, Qualcomm, Dyson, Shopify, Tesla & Meta) that is looking to expand the operational part of our business. We're still in the first days of building the company and this is a unique opportunity to be an early employee in a high-growth, high ambition startup environment. From Day 1, you’ll be able to work with an experienced founding team backed by top-tier investors.

You can read more on why we believe you should spend your time working on construction, and learn more about our vision and company.

About you and this role
We’re looking for software engineers with deep knowledge of software engineering and controls engineering to join our team. Help us bring our robots to life and join our mission to bring automation to the construction industry to create affordable, beautiful, high-quality housing for everyone.

At Monumental, we’re building an operating system to make on-site construction possible with robotics. Our software stack allows us to do everything from 3D reconstruction (through photogrammetry) of a construction site, design of 3D structures that will be built, supply chain, path planning, and inverse/forward kinematics of our robots.

Some of the types of challenges you might be working on:

1. Designing and modeling a localization and control system for our autonomous ground vehicles that can move around a construction site
2. Designing or optimizing specific control loops, e.g. for mortar flow control through different sensors (e.g. a load cell, or time-of-flight sensors)
3. Design and optimize new motions for a 4DOF XYZ-style crane or explore adding a new degree of freedom to the system
4. Implementing production-level code at whatever level makes sense (embedded firmware in C++, or our application layer in Rust) necessary to bring your algorithms to life.

If you're new to robotics, you might enjoy reading Bouke's blog post on his experience joining Monumental as a software engineer.

What you'll be responsible for

• Design and implementation of controls algorithms, both prototype quality for early experiments and production quality for real-world use. We expect you to write C, C++, Rust or Python code, not doing simulations in Matlab.
• Design and implement localization algorithms (e.g., visual-inertial SLAM) and ensure we use the right sensors and logic to figure out where we are in world-space, using sensor fusion when required.
• Design and build tools that allow debugging, analysis, and performance evaluation of your algorithms.
• Bringing software engineering best practices to our team. You should be able to write production-level code that will stand on its own.
• Root cause analysis and general debugging skills whenever things fail.
• Taking full ownership of a project, going from idea to prototype to finished project.

What we’re looking for

• Experience implementing algorithms for the calibration and motion control and path planning of complex robotic systems.
• Practical and theoretical knowledge on modeling, signal processing, motion planning, sensor fusion, collision avoidance and SLAM.
• Proven experience in software engineering, in e.g. C, C++, Python, Rust, or comparable languages.
• Software engineering skills and best practices. You use git for version control, know how to do unit tests or how to automate deployment of your code.
• Basic familiarity with Linux systems and conventions. E.g., you’re comfortable ssh’ing into other machines to figure out why something isn't working.
• Experience in troubleshooting issues and conducting root cause analysis.
• Preferred experience in building prototypes in a zero-to-one environment and/or top student teams.
• B.Sc. in Electrical-, Mechanical-, Mechatronics-, Controls System Engineering or equivalent.

Why Monumental?

Joining Monumental means being at the forefront of a movement aimed at making significant strides in the construction industry. Here, your work has the potential to impact not just the company but the future of how we build. If you're driven by innovation, eager to tackle complex challenges, and ready to make a tangible difference, we want to hear from you.

Interested candidates should reach out to us at: [email protected] - share with us the most interesting or challenging project you've worked on with your CV or portfolio —we're excited to learn about your journey and discuss how you can contribute to ours.

If you don’t meet all the qualifications here but are excited about Monumental and feel you’d still be able to help us solve difficult problems, do get in touch. We are open to generalists with a demonstrated ability to focus on outcomes and get things done and are comfortable with you learning things as you go along.