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 80 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.

About you and this role

You will join our team of hardware and software engineers, bringing 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 focuses 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 allows 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 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.
• 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, 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, biasing towards removing unnecessary constraints to quickly develop concepts.
• Where necessary, decide on materials and simulate static and dynamic loads, stresses, and vibrations using hand calculations or FEA tools.
• Fabricate a proof-of-concept prototype in the shortest amount of time:
  • Source all required components;
  • Fabricate the necessary parts in our workshop, whether they’re 3D printed or require CNC milling or turning;
  • Assemble and bring up functional prototypes by pulling together all required components and fabricating any custom parts—whether 3D-printed, CNC-milled, or turned—to create a fast proof-of-concept.
  • Integrate and validate the actuators and electronics your prototype needs, including sensors, motors, solenoids, encoders, and related hardware.
  • Write or adapt simple embedded code (Arduino, ESP32, etc.) to bring up the 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, while collaborating closely with the team where needed.
• Own testing the prototype, iterating on your designs where necessary, and sometimes throwing things out and starting over again.
• You should enjoy fast-iteration cycles. Our favourite tradition is showing off our new hardware successes and failures in our Friday show and tell.
• Work with our software and perception engineers and integrate designs into our software and perception stack, making them truly autonomous.
• Spend time on construction sites, both seeing how your designs perform in the real world and for inspiration of what we should be improving next.
• Once successful, you will productize the prototype:
  • Produce clean CADs in OnShape following best practices;
  • Produce technical drawings, documentation and other artifacts to aid small series production and assembly.
  • Work closely with the assembly technicians to understand how you can 10x production of your design.

What We’re Looking For

• Someone with a bias for action: you build fast, iterate in quick sprints and focus on de-risking what matters most. You’re comfortable developing hardware at software speed, continuously refining requirements through early testing and deployment.
• A proven record of being a builder and being able to work autonomously: you can point us to examples of shipped projects where you were the driving force of getting something done. This can be in a professional context, in a top student (“dream”) team, or even just personal side projects.
• Experience in designing and delivering products from concept up to low-volume production. Exposure to high-volume manufacturing is a plus.
• Proficiency in rapid prototyping, 3D printing, machining, and milling to make product designs a reality.
• Deep knowledge of mechanical systems and structural dynamics: e.g. statics, mechanics of materials, dynamics, vibrations, material science, and controls.
• Expertise with 3D CAD modeling with complex parts and assemblies, e.g. OnShape, Solidworks, or Siemens NX.
• Strong in mechanical/structural calculations. You’re comfortable moving fast using first principles approaches to problems and hand calcs to de-risk designs, and disciplined about using simulations only when they actually add value.
• Experience selecting, sourcing, and integrating electronics components (e.g. actuators, sensors, cameras) into hardware design.
• Experience owning problems that sit within broad problem spaces, across the product life cycle.
  • We want to see examples where you’ve led multidisciplinary teams: mechanical, electrical, software, perception, etc., and have driven design, verification, deployment, and iteration.
• Being able to write (embedded) code in C or C++ is a plus.
• B.Sc. in mechanical, mechatronics, or robotics engineering or similar experience is a nice to have.

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.