Software Engineer, Full-Stack

Monumental http://monumental.co/ 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 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 looking for a software engineer who wants to build full-stack software that can touch the physical world, not another SaaS product https://dontbuildsaas.com/. You’ll develop and deploy software that controls fleets of autonomous construction robots. Our software stack is very broad, covering everything from microcontroller firmware up to the UI that operators use to control the robots. We’ve built CAD tools for designing masonry structures, path planning and motion control, telemetry and inspection tools, and distributed data storage and sync.

The technical challenges we're solving combine hardware, software, and infrastructure at scale - while maintaining high availability on construction sites. Atrium, our operating system for construction https://www.monumental.co/atrium, is built with TypeScript and Rust. Much of our Rust code is compiled to WebAssembly, allowing our UI to interface directly with the same control code that we deploy to our robots. This gives us a shared stack between real-world deployments and simulated runs in the front-end. You can read about how we control robots with TypeScript in this post by our CTO, Sebastiaan. https://buildmonumental.substack.com/p/plans-as-data

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 https://bou.ke/blog/robotics/. You might also enjoy seeing this video by Andreas Klinger of what our office environment looks like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOo8n19XEns.

What you'll be responsible for

• Writing Rust and TypeScript code that controls the robot in real-time, turning high-level goals into small steps that the robot can execute

• Building tools and dashboards in TypeScript and React to manage and monitor a growing, distributed fleet of robots across multiple construction sites

• Debugging complex issues that cut across the stack: e.g. bugs in the Chromium GC; WiFi connection issues with robot systems or race conditions in concurrent Rust code

• Designing the core architecture of our platform, and choosing the right abstractions to map the messy world of construction into elegant software

• Prototyping and building components that interact with various microcontrollers and distributed subsystems

• Working collaboratively with our team of hardware engineers, control engineers, and robot operators to improve product experience, reliability and performance of our platform

What we’re looking for

• Industry experience building and deploying production systems in multiple languages (Rust experience is valuable but not required)

• Strong CS or mathematics foundation– you are a strong geometric thinker, understand basic linear algebra and 3D transformations

• Basic familiarity with Linux systems and conventions. E.g., you’re comfortable SSH’ing into other machines to figure out why something isn't working

• Knowledge of common communication protocols, e.g. UDP, TCP/IP and WebSockets

• A strong sense of ownership and motivation. You’re able to drive problems and projects start-to-finish without someone project managing you, and can thrive in a chaotic environment.

• A high percentage of our software team have been a technical founder, CTO, or founding engineer before. If that’s your background, you’ll likely fit in. But we also get excited by people with a demonstrated background of shipping impressive work at any type of company.

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.