Software Engineer, Machine Vision

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 of about 100 engineers and technicians, with backgrounds 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 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

We’re looking for software engineers with deep knowledge of software engineering and modern machine vision to join our team. 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.

At Monumental, we’re building an operating system to make on-site construction possible with robotics. Our software stack enables everything from 3D reconstruction (through photogrammetry) of a construction site, design of 3D structures to be built, supply chain, path planning, and inverse/forward kinematics of our robots.

Some of the types of challenges you might be working on:

• Developing algorithms for localization, mapping, calibration, and state estimation using state-of-the-art techniques such as visual-inertial SLAM or through fiducial markers, allowing us to drive our autonomous vehicles in the ever-changing environment of a construction site
• Designing machine vision systems that can judge the quality of bricks, mortar, or other construction objects and that can run in production
• Working with our software team to build a production-level system that ingests sensor data, runs your algorithms, and interfaces with our software stack
• Measuring the performance of our sensing system and improving it, including characterising the sources of various inaccuracies and deficiencies that we might encounter
• Implementing robust, production-level code that can bring your algorithms to life. You own your projects from start to finish and don’t approach problems like a researcher who hands them over to a separate software engineering team

What you'll be responsible for

• Design and implementation of machine vision algorithms, both prototype quality for early experiments and production quality for real-world use
• Converting working prototypes into robust, production-quality code, demonstrating proven software engineering experience beyond just working in a Jupyter notebook
• Designing and implementing novel localization algorithms (e.g., visual-inertial SLAM, or localization through fiducial markers), ensuring the use of the right sensors and logic to determine world-space position, using sensor fusion when required
• Implementing state-of-the-art machine vision algorithms for object detection, object localization, or quality control purposes
• Implementing and optimizing 3D reconstruction and photogrammetry pipelines and workflows
• Designing and building tools for debugging, analysis, and performance evaluation of your algorithms
• Bringing software engineering best practices to the team, writing production-level code that stands on its own
• Root cause analysis and general debugging skills whenever things fail
• Taking full ownership of a project, from idea to prototype to finished product

What we’re looking for

• Deep understanding and experience with multiple hardware sensor systems such as LiDARs, IMUs, and (depth) cameras
• Experience in developing, implementing, and testing mapping, localization, and state estimation algorithms, such as (VI-)SLAM, VIO, ICP, and Kalman filters
• Ideally, some experience with real-time, deep learning-based computer vision, e.g., with multi-object tracking systems
• Proven experience in software engineering, in languages such as C, C++, Python, Rust, or comparable
• Strong software engineering skills and best practices: using git for version control, writing unit tests, and automating deployment
• A strong bias for action and output; we emphasize shipping frequently and fast iteration loops
• A strong sense of ownership and motivation

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.

Interested candidates should reach out to us at: iwanttojoin@monumental.co — share with us the most interesting or challenging project you've worked on with your CV or portfolio. We’re excited to learn about your journey and discuss how you can contribute to ours.

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 are open to generalists with a demonstrated ability to focus on outcomes and get things done, and are comfortable with you learning things as you go along.