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 growing team (about 100 team members)of mostly engineers and technicians, coming from companies like Palantir, Qualcomm, Dyson, Shopify, Tesla, Meta and 1X. It’s still the early 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.

Monumental is based near Artis zoo in the Plantage, in the city center of Amsterdam. We have a beautiful office with an in-house workshop and robot testing facility. We’re explicitly not a hybrid or remote-first company: we enjoy collaborating 5 days a week at the office. You can read more on why we believe you should spend your time working on construction, and learn more about our vision and company. You might also enjoy seeing this video by Andreas Klinger of what our office environment looks like.

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. If this sounds interesting, you should read about Alfred's experience joining us as an intern and becoming our first forward deployed robot engineer or Substack on what happens when robots ignore construction rules.

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. If you're new to robotics, you might enjoy reading Bouke's blog post on his experience joining Monumental as a software engineer, Josefine's interview with a seat at the table. You can read about how we control robots with TypeScript in this post by our CTO, Sebastiaan.

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 sites: 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 that 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.

• 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.

For open applications (where you don’t see an exact role match), please reach out to us at: iwanttojoin@monumental.co - share with us the most interesting or challenging project you’ve worked on, why you want to join and your CV or portfolio.

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 welcome generalists who focus on outcomes and are eager to learn on the job.