Forward Deployed Robotics Engineer

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
The typical startup advice to become an effective engineer is “go spend time with your users”. Our version of this is “go spend time with our robots in their natural habitat, the construction site”.

It turns out to be very hard to sit in an office behind a desk and improve the behaviour and performance of a robot, tuning kinematics, or scoping new features that interact with the messy real world of a construction site. We’ve found that the most effective way of doing this is being with the robot and being in a position where you can fix it yourself instead of asking another engineer to do it for you.

This is a unique and new role on the intersection of engineering, product and operations. We consider it a key role that will have an outsized impact on our business. It’s definitely not going to be for everyone: you’ll be wearing hard hats and hard-toe boots most of your days. You’re going to be running our robots, sometimes in our test environments in the office, and many times outside on construction sites.

We don’t expect you to have prior experience with robotics. Our ideal candidate has excellent problem-solving and debugging skills, combines technical skills with creativity, and can deal with high-stress environments when things fail. You’re a strong engineer but above all obsessed with driving good outcomes.

If you’re done with doing yet another SaaS job, this is a unique opportunity to bring yourself back into the real world: you’ll learn how buildings get built, how robots work, and be at the cutting edge of applied robotics.

We are unable to support relocation for this role. Applicants must be based in the Netherlands and able to commute onsite to Amsterdam to be considered, we can provide visa sponsorship for local candidates.

If you're new to robotics, you might enjoy reading Alfred's blog post about his experience joining Monumental as an intern.

What you’ll be working on

• As a starting point, you’ll be comfortable building walls with our robots, similar to our Construction Robot Operators.
• Invariably, we’ll encounter many problems on each new construction site: the topology of the site, specific things that need to be built, or edge cases that we haven’t dealt with before. It’s your primary responsibility to identify those issues and to own solving them start-to-finish: coming up with a solution, writing the code to fix it, and deploying and testing it on the robot again. We do this in fast iteration cycles of hours and days, not weeks
• In addition, you will likely take on building and testing new bleeding edge features–they might speed up our robots, allow us to drive into tighter spaces, or building something robots have never built before
• Debugging failures that happen on-site: part of this is typical software debugging, but you’ll also learn how to identify issues through the entire stack including electronics and mechanical issues
• Taking broader notes on things you’re seeing on the construction site and with our robots that you can’t take on immediately or yourself. 10-20% of this job is a bit like being a product manager, identifying new projects and opportunities that can be discussed with the wider team
• Being the face and ambassador of the company on a construction site. Our robots don’t talk so people will typically chat to you if they see you next to a robot.

What we’re looking for

• Ability to code: we don’t care if you’re self-taught, went through a coding academy, or have a M.Sc. or PhD in Computer Science. You need to be able to solve complex engineering problems with code and have at least 2 years of experience doing this professionally
• We don’t expect any prior experience with robotics, but being comfortable with basic mathematics (e.g., linear algebra) and reasoning geometrically is a strong plus
• You’re always able to keep the outcome in mind, without the tendency to over-engineer solutions. You are excellent at debugging and decomposing problems. Our stack is very deep, given that things can fail both in hardware and software, and you can logically reason through various failure modes
• You love getting your hands dirty and don’t want to sit behind a computer all day. You will frequently wake up early to drive to a construction site on time and enjoy being in that context. You don’t need to have any experience on a construction site though
• You’re fluent in English (spoken and written). Being verbally fluent in Dutch is a plus on a construction site but not a requirement.

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.