Mechatronics Engineer

Monumental http://monumental.cois 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 https://www.monumental.co/why, and learn more about our vision https://www.monumental.co/our-vision and company https://www.monumental.co/about. You might also enjoy seeing this video by Andreas Klinger of what our office environment looks like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOo8n19XEns.

About you and this role

We're building robots to bring automation to construction, making affordable, beautiful, high-quality housing possible at scale. We're looking for a mechatronics engineer who's a maker at heart, with a bias for speed and simplicity, who can design a robot on paper and build one in real life.

In this role, you'll own entire mechatronic systems from idea through to production. You'll be involved in every stage of the engineering process: scoping broad, novel capabilities, running back-of-envelope calculations, and driving hardware design through prototyping, testing, and validation. This includes actuator and sensor selection, system integration and firmware development. You'll debug hardware issues both at our office and onsite, test on live construction sites, and iterate toward robust, scalable designs. Once you've proven you can own tightly scoped projects, you'll lead broader problem spaces with a small multidisciplinary team.

The challenges are real: full on-site autonomy, construction-scale payloads, reliable operation at height, and millimetre-level positioning across our stack. We want people genuinely excited to tackle these alongside a capable, supportive team.

Our approach focuses on identifying key risks and attacking them through rapid prototyping, not lengthy design cycles. You'll have high autonomy and minimal drag: few meetings, no unnecessary approvals. If you like the sound of this, you should read Niall's Substack about why he moved country to make construction robots to solve Europe's housing crisis. https://open.substack.com/pub/buildmonumental/p/i-quit-my-job-and-moved-country-to?r=68ngjs&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

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 at scale. But 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. As our robot’s capabilities expand, you’ll also think through the safety implications and design appropriate mitigations.

• 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.

• 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.

What We’re Looking For

• Someone who can design hardware from scratch.

• You’re comfortable working at the interface between mechanical, software, controls, and vision engineering. You won't be expected to develop control systems or vision algorithms, but you should be able to collaborate effectively to ship complete projects.

• Experience developing proof-of-concept prototypes in the shortest amount of time.

• Source all required components;

• Fabricate the necessary parts in-house whether 3D printed, CNC-milled or turned.

• Integrating and validating actuators and electronics: microcontrollers, sensors, motors, solenoids, encoders, and related hardware

• Writing or adapting simple embedded code (Arduino, ESP32, etc.) to bring up electronics, run basic tests, and verify mechanisms

While you'll have support from our in-house electronics experts to productise successful concepts, we're looking for someone who's confident building quick, scrappy prototypes more-or-less independently. You won't need to design production-ready PCBs yourself, but you should be able to understand system requirements and translate them into clear briefs for our electronics engineers to develop.

• Experience going from prototype to production.

• Handing over validated prototypes to our production team, providing the context they need to scale and optimise for manufacturing.

• Collaborating with electronics engineers to communicate system requirements and ensure designs are robust and scalable.

• Producing clean CAD in Onshape following best practices, ready for others to refine for production.

• Creating first drafts of technical drawings, documentation, and other artefacts that the production team can develop into full production packages.

• Bonus: experience in early-stage startups or top student team competitions.

• B.Sc. in electrical, mechatronics, or robotics engineering or equivalent experience.

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.

Unfortunately we do not currently support internships.

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.