Mechanical 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

We are looking for a mechanical engineer to join our team of hardware and software engineers, trying to bring robots and automation to the construction industry to create affordable, beautiful, high quality housing for everyone. You are a maker, who enjoys building physical things from start to finish, with a bias for speed and simplicity.

You enjoy being involved in and contributing to the entire engineering process: asking the right questions to scope a problem, doing back of the envelope calculations, fabricating parts in our workshop, testing your design live on a construction site and iterating on it to produce a robust and scalable design.

Once you've shown you can own tightly scoped projects at high speed, you'll have the opportunity to lead broader, cross-cutting problem spaces with a small multidisciplinary team. We're tackling some of the hardest problems in construction robotics: full on-site autonomy, lifting construction-scale payloads, reliable operation at height, and millimetre-level positioning accuracy across our entire technology stack. We're looking for people who are genuinely excited to lead these efforts alongside a highly capable and supportive team.

Our approach to building robots has focused on identifying the key areas that need de-risking and tackling them head-on through rapid prototyping, avoiding lengthy design processes. This has allowed us to achieve remarkable results in a surprisingly short amount of time, defying conventional expectations. If our approach excites you, this role could be a great fit for your interests and skills.

We will offer you an environment that will allow you to thrive using this approach: you will have a high amount of autonomy and we will work hard to not slow you down with company meetings, unnecessary spending approvals, or other processes.

What You'll Be Working On

Imagine a fleet of autonomous robots rolling onto a construction site in the morning and by sundown, a fully built, beautiful home stands ready for a family to move in. That's the future we're building.

Today, our robot systems are already constructing real homes across the Netherlands  we're just getting started. Your work won't be about incremental improvements, you'll tackle broad and novel problems that unlock autonomous construction:

* Pushing toward full robot autonomy for our masonry systems: automated wall-anchor installation and mortar pointing to produce beautiful brickwork. Autonomous lift platforms and fully automated material-supply enabling our fleet to work uninterrupted across large, messy sites.

* Designing for extreme reliability: our robots need to be tough enough to survive months of harsh construction conditions, yet serviceable and redeployable in under 24 hours.

* Building next-gen hardware to expand what our robots can do: higher-precision brick placement, larger payloads, expanded build envelopes, hot-swappable end effectors, and operation in tight, constrained spaces like scaffolding.

* Developing lift systems to autonomously and safely lift 1000 kg loads to 10 meters.

* Getting hands-on in the field: you'll join deployments where we're building real homes, whilst stress-testing systems and uncovering the edge-case problems that can only be found in the field. This will help you determine new critical features to unlock and learn what our product needs long-term.

We're looking for engineers who take ownership end-to-end and love tackling problems that don't fit neatly into traditional mechanical engineering boundaries. This involves:

* Designing hardware concepts from scratch. You should feel comfortable identifying and defining the key requirements to develop an MVP and work towards it. You should bias towards removing unnecessary constraints to quickly develop concepts.

* Where necessary,…