Mechanical Engineer, Reliability at Monumental — RealJobs — RealJobs

Monumental is automating on-site construction with robotics and software. Our mission is to make construction software-defined and autonomous - a future where beautiful, bespoke buildings go up in a single day, with minimal labour.

We're a growing team of engineers, operators and technicians from companies like Palantir, Qualcomm, Dyson, Shopify, Tesla, Meta and Google DeepMind. It's still the early days of building the company, and this is a chance to make an outsized impact on a problem that matters. From day one, you’ll be working with an experienced founding team backed by top-tier investors.

Monumental is based in the city centre of Amsterdam, in a beautiful facility with an fully equipped workshop and robot testing floor. We build the whole stack in-house - hardware and software, we're explicitly not a hybrid or remote-first company - you can't build robots or walls from home, so we're onsite five days a week.

About the role

Monumental are looking for a mechanical engineer to mature our current robot design and enable us build out and deploy a thousand-strong robot fleet to build beautiful, bespoke buildings. Our robots are deployed on sites across the Netherlands and the UK and will be in the US within a year.

Most robotic applications require robots to function in controlled, clean environments. This is not the case at Monumental. Our robots must be reliable enough to withstand the harsh realities of a construction site: rain, dirt, temperature cycles and impact. This role will focus on improving the reliability of our robots, so that our growing fleet will survive months on construction sites with minimal maintenance. Expect to be regularly on site, so you know our product inside out. If you want an office job, this isn't the role for you.

For more context on building hardware at Monumental, read Niall’s Substack on why he quit his job and moved country to make robots to fix Europe’s housing crisis.

What You'll Do

Own making sure our robots can build on construction sites for months with minimal downtime. Like most things at Monumental, we track this using the number of deployment bricks laid. You'll get us to 12,000 bricks laid before a hardware failure.
Rapidly understand how our robots work, the hardware that goes into them, and their failure modes. Systematically improve their design with respect to reliability, and conduct rigorous testing to validate the improvements.
Own the loop from discovering a failure in the field to a validated fix shipped to the fleet. Root cause the failure, design and test the fix in the office, then validate it holds up in the field.
Make sure R&D hardware is validated before it scales. Define validation criteria for hardware, design rigs for reliability testing, and raise the bar for validation within the hardware team.
Work with the maintenance team, both in the office and on deployments. Find maintenance pain points and fix them.

What We're Looking For

2+ years of experience in reliability and test engineering, ideally in robotics. You have taken hardware that didn't survive its environment and made it robust.
Strong experience with environmental and mechanical reliability tests: IP, temperature, vibration and shock. You have designed and built the test rigs and run the analysis yourself.
Experience making and repairing electromechanical assemblies.
Experience shipping hardware from prototype through to medium-series production.
Strong knowledge of GD&T, and producing 2D and 3D drawings.

Nice-to-have

BSc in Mechanical, Electrical, Manufacturing or Industrial Engineering, or equivalent.
Examples of delivering complex electromechanical assemblies that operated at scale in harsh environments.
Experience developing accelerated life reliability tests.
Experience with electric motors, gearboxes, or actuators