Mechatronics Engineer

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

Monumental is a growing team of engineers, operators and technicians from companies like Palantir, Qualcomm, Dyson, Shopify, Tesla, Meta and Google DeepMind. It is still the early days of building the company, offering the chance to make an outsized impact on a problem that matters. From day one, you’ll be working with an experienced founding team.

Based in the city centre of Amsterdam, Monumental has a fully equipped facility with a workshop and robot testing floor. The team builds the whole stack in-house - hardware and software - and works onsite five days a week.

About the role

Monumental is building robots to bring automation to construction, making affordable, beautiful, high-quality housing possible at scale. The team is looking for a mechatronics engineer who is a maker at heart, with a bias for speed and simplicity, and 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 the 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 the stack. The team is looking for people genuinely excited to tackle these alongside a capable, supportive team.

Monumental’s 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.

What you'll do

Today, Monumental’s robot systems are already constructing real homes across the Netherlands at scale. But the team is 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 masonry systems: automated wall-anchor installation and mortar pointing to produce beautiful brickwork. Autonomous lift platforms and fully automated material supply enabling the fleet to work uninterrupted across large, messy sites. As the robots’ capabilities expand, you’ll also think through the safety implications and design appropriate mitigations.
• Designing for extreme reliability: 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 the 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 real homes are being built, whilst stress-testing systems and uncovering edge-case problems that can only be found in the field. This will help you determine new critical features to unlock and learn what the 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.
• Ability to source all required components.
• Ability to fabricate the necessary parts in-house whether 3D printed, CNC-milled or turned.
• Ability to integrate and validate actuators and electronics: microcontrollers, sensors, motors, solenoids, encoders, and related hardware.
• Ability to write or adapt simple embedded code (Arduino, ESP32, etc.) to bring up electronics, run basic tests, and verify mechanisms.

While you'll have support from in-house electronics experts to productise successful concepts, Monumental is 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 electronics engineers to develop.

• Experience going from prototype to production.
• Ability to hand over validated prototypes to the production team, providing the context they need to scale and optimise for manufacturing.
• Ability to collaborate with electronics engineers to communicate system requirements and ensure designs are robust and scalable.
• Ability to produce clean CAD in Onshape following best practices, ready for others to refine for production.
• Ability to create 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 buildings are made.

Unfortunately, Monumental does 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 solve difficult problems, generalists who focus on outcomes and are eager to learn on the job are welcome.