Mechatronics 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.

Were a growing team (about 100 team members) of mostly engineers and technicians coming from companies like Palantir Qualcomm Dyson Shopify Tesla Meta and 1X. Its 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 youll 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. Were 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 and learn more about our vision and company. You might also enjoy seeing this video by Andreas Klinger of what our office environment looks like.

About you and this role

Were building robots to bring automation to construction making affordable beautiful high-quality housing possible at scale. Were looking for a mechatronics engineer whos 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 youll own entire mechatronic systems from idea through to production. Youll 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. Youll debug hardware issues both at our office and onsite test on live construction sites and iterate toward robust scalable designs. Once youve proven you can own tightly scoped projects youll 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. Youll have high autonomy and minimal drag: few meetings no unnecessary approvals. If you like the sound of this you should read Nialls Substack about why he moved country to make construction robots to solve Europes housing crisis.

What Youll 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. Thats the future were building.

Today our robot systems are already constructing real homes across the Netherlands at scale. But were just getting started. Your work wont be about incremental improvements youll 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 robots capabilities expand youll 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: youll join deployments where were 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 Were Looking For

• Someone who can design hardware from scratch.

• Youre comfortable working at the interface between mechanical software controls and vision engineering. You wont 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 youll have support from our in-house electronics experts to productise successful concepts were looking for someone whos confident building quick scrappy prototypes more-or-less independently. You wont 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.

• . 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 youre 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 dont see an exact role match) please reach out to us at: - share with us the most interesting or challenging project youve worked on why you want to join and your CV or portfolio.

Unfortunately we do not currently support internships.

If you dont meet all the qualifications here but are excited about Monumental and feel youd 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.

Required Experience:

IC